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“... some money of his own by using his nose and publishing a number of bestselling books including Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He had many affairs, and moved in a world in which his wife had little interest, except that it was new, and she liked things that were new, even if she often missed the point of them. She missed the point of Proust, for example: that ...”

“... extraordinaire, brings it all back. By all accounts, de Acosta (1893-1968) was a serious lady ghoul. So lamia-like her sartorial mode – she favoured black silk cloaks and trousers, tricorn hats, blood-red lipstick and cadaverish white face-powder – Tallulah Bankhead was not the only acquaintance to nickname her ‘Countess Dracula’. Yet such ...”

“... her dust-jackets. She is pretty, she is pert, she is immaculately chic; she signifies drop-dead lady wit, a flirt, a charmer, a dandyess and a poseuse. If somebody has put this sort of effort into their self-projection, it’s kind of by the way to call them affected or inauthentic, for, unlike, say, Simone de Beauvoir, they have never pretended to be ...”

“... Robert​ Reed became president of the United Kingdom Supreme Court on 13 January 2020, succeeding Lady Hale. By the end of 2021, the Supreme Court had produced 111 judgments since his appointment, 53 in 2020 and 58 in 2021, with Lord Reed himself sitting in 56 of these cases. These decisions give us an opportunity to assess how his Supreme Court is performing in the current malign political atmosphere ...”

“... The Picture of Dorian Gray), the theatre designer Percy Anderson, and ‘the Ranee of Sarawak’, Lady Margaret Brooke. He knew Wilde, and developed flirtatious friendships with the much older playwright and composer Hamilton Aïdé and with Henry James, who looked back wistfully years later on ‘something – ah, so tender! – in me that was only quite ...”

“... of his career rather than its reward. Although he conducted a clandestine affair with the Dowager Lady Sheffield ten years after Amy’s death, he dared not marry her, as an abject letter to her explained in appropriately tormented syntax: ‘If I should marry I am sure never to have favour of them that I had rather yet never have wife than lose them, yet is ...”

“... then what is it? What monstrous vanity would think it was perfectly natural for a little old a lady to receive a tumultuous welcome from her hotel staff? Of course she didn’t believe she was really famous, towards the end. She knew she wasn’t famous enough. These are not the passions of a woman who knows her place.Nevertheless, to believe women are not ...”

“... relief, not least that of the unhappy secretary of the Society for Purer Australian History, Lady Cravenburn suddenly arrives from England, and recognising a chance too good to be missed, dismisses historical minutiae, even implying shared blood between the families due to some unspecified bastardy back in the Home Counties in the 18th ...”

“... relic has its double in romance. In the bloodthirsty Perlesvaus, from the early 13th century, a lady called the Queen of the Circle of Gold sets the crown in a reliquary of gold and precious stones, anticipating the French king, even though she is still a pagan. Eventually she crowns the hero Perceval with the precious circlet, presents herself for ...”

“... as two people (‘utter ruin to us’) and, more specifically, as two women: ‘the report of lady-authorship,’ Bradley wrote, ‘will dwarf & enfeeble our work at every turn … And we have many things to say the world will not tolerate from a woman’s lips.’But what did they want to say? In conversation with Oscar Wilde, Bradley and Cooper agreed ...”

“... Grey joined the couple for a ‘funny visit’ to Cloan, Haldane’s house in Perthshire, where Lady Grey was embarrassed by the tastelessness of Margot’s repartee. Haldane, steadfastly devoted to the memory of the first Mrs Asquith, never ceased to blame her successor for having led his friend astray. ‘London society came ... to have a great attraction ...”

“... a writer, she tells her grown-up daughter, she would put it all in a novel and title it The Maiden Lady. Her memory is prepared to sift and resettle actual events, touching up certain episodes, assigning blame and reward, and bringing the story to rich, ripe resolution. The daughter is offended by her mother’s cheap and easy distortions. She herself, given a ...”

“... for much of the time – like the man in the Fleet Street pub who was accosted by some American lady tourists asking whether this was the home of ‘your famous Dr Johnson’. He is alleged to have risen from his bar stool and replied: ‘Madam, I am Dr Johnson, so fuck off.’ At least Mr Wharton acknowledges the most significant peculiarity of the story ...”

“... neglect of pressing social problems by all duly constituted authorities. Here the body of Nemo, Lady Dedlock’s former lover and Esther Summerson’s father, is shoved into a fetid, corpse-filled ditch, only to fester into the source of the infection which strikes Jo and Lady Dedlock dead and scars Esther permanently. In ...”

“... appointment of professors.’ This turns out, however, to be a double-bluff, setting up the Iron Lady as a straw woman, only to have her high ferric valency confirmed by analysis. No whodunit, this book belongs in another popular genre which has taken up an awful lot of shelf-space in recent years – the shedunit. Margaret Thatcher’s paramountcy remains ...”