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“... but its destruction was, he said, ‘an act of vandalism’ on a scale rare outside wartime. Lady Churchill had form. She had put her foot through a preparatory sketch by Sickert. When the sculptor David McFall, whose bust was the last image of Churchill taken from life, met her, she told him what she had done to the Sutherland, adding ...”

“... the place and she isn’t wearing any gloves. The year is 1884 – could she be any less like a lady? Mycroft decides instantly that Enola needs to go to a finishing school, and she sees this as a good reason to escape to London in search of her mother. On the train she meets another runaway, a young man who happens to be the missing marquess, and the plot ...”

“... Records of Woman (1828) would have recognised in Ella Stuart’s name the legendary figure of Lady Arabella Stuart. Prevented by James I, her cousin, from living with her commoner husband, Arabella Stuart feigned illness to stay a short time at the East Barnet house which was Landon’s childhood home from 1809 to 1815 (when it was known as Trevor ...”

“... world, of herself and of her relationship with her husband. Ferdinand and Isabella were knight and lady and her devotion to St Michael was to the master of an order of ‘angelic chivalry’. The Granada War – which Liss insists was ‘the Queen’s war’ – was not so much a crusade as a knightly adventure, in which the warriors were inspired by fear of ...”

“... to a bomb dropped on London in, precisely, 1940. By what he calls ‘a curious coincidence’ and Lady Bracknell would call carelessness, he lost both his parents, too, in the same raid, though to a separate bomb on a different part of London. By the time of the story’s action he is an expatriate, living and working – for a chocolate firm – in ...”

“... home opinion would be slow to stir on such a matter. But the test of marriage was whether the lady would be acceptable at the dinner tables of Camberley. It was the closer and more frequent contact with middle-class England through the steamer and furlough that progressively raised the sex barrier, not some mysterious mystique of empire. Two social groups ...”

“... transfer of power, and soon the death of Edward and the failed coup d’état in the name of Lady Jane Grey, followed by the successful coup and triumph of Elizabeth’s Catholic sister. The Protestant princess, seen as her father’s true daughter and ‘mere English’, was now at the centre of plots, and dabbling in treason herself, just like her ...”

“... backed with playing cards: sometimes the face of the card is left visible so a picture of a court lady or melancholy lover has a couple of hearts on the reverse – a little secret between the limner and his sitter.Hilliard’s standard fee for a portrait miniature was £3 (around £500 in modern money), though a fancy locket, jewelled setting or ivory case ...”

“... alert to its own power. For as long as I thought polite, I looked at these drawings, remembering Lady Gregory’s remark that, since John Butler Yeats had so much difficulty finishing paintings, he should be encouraged to do as many drawings as possible, drawings that could be done in one sitting. As I turned, my eye was caught by an oil painting hanging on ...”

“... in its default gentleman’s club mode likes nothing more than chuntering on about the perils of a Lady Macbeth. (Elspeth Howe waited 15 years to extract her revenge, helping her husband write the resignation speech that triggered Thatcher’s demise.) The great advantage when Lady Macbeth takes the reins herself is that no ...”

“... 1981 to 1984. ‘The Residents were a delightful and happy group of ladies,’ he says, ‘each lady presented as a unique individual, with a unique personality, well able to ask relevant questions and to express her opinion and, above all, ready and willing to gossip, to tease and be teased and to joke.’ And perhaps it is true. Irish women are often ...”

“... him to prefer the quietest sort of ruin for the object of his affections’. The young lady, for her part, ‘saw through him, and had not the least intention of being seduced’. This is the kind of fun on the subject which Jane Austen had always enjoyed, and which probably cheered her last days. So far from the atmosphere of Sanditon being ...”

“... to have provided more than a personal sketch. He acknowledges his ‘greatest debt’ to Lord and Lady Denning for their patience and kindness in helping him, and the ‘sketch’ is on the whole adulatory. Heward does, however, put the other side, saying of Denning: ‘A serious criticism of him is that he lacked intellectual honesty; this certainly took ...”

“... legends in a distant, perhaps too jocular manner, but suddenly breaks into her ghost story about a Lady Wynne of Tudor times with the stark information that she herself, when pregnant, lost her child in the same way that Lady Wynne had done. She is terse and stoical again when reporting the death of her young son, merely ...”

“... To be recognised and praised by James, whose early ‘Daisy Miller’ and The Portrait of a Lady she had long admired, set the seal on her success in this evasion: but there was a price to be paid, that of submission to the Jamesian codes, an acceptance of his rank. She addressed him as Cher Maître, and the genuine affection of Cher could not ...”