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“... public who simply refused to read his books: after the last mild success of The Portrait of a Lady in 1881, James experienced half a lifetime of small and dwindling sales, which culminated, in the case of the New York Collected Edition, in total failure. Edith made thousands. But of course both she and the contemporary reading public had a point. There ...”

“... with something approaching innocence; at other times, as with Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady or Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove, it would be done out of dark need; in the end, as with Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl, it would be done with aplomb and so stylishly that no one was sure they had noticed. During this first visit alone to ...”

“... been invaded by the American Friendship Society (‘Lois Ravenna Jr,’ says the name tag of the lady opposite). They are a middle-aged to elderly group, ladies whom I would call ‘game’ (and Barry Humphreys ‘spunky’). They know they cannot expect the creature comforts on offer at the Wichita Hilton but they are determined not to complain or be ...”

“... dwells on a particular form to tease out the meanings, and not vice versa. Unlike the naked lady next to Courbet in the painting, the beggar woman defeats the male gaze. She doesn’t titillate or arouse, at least not in the usual ways. Take her legs: ‘bare, flabby, pale, unhealthy, yet not without a certain unexpected, pearly sexual allure, the right ...”

“... the future tense of the verbs.’ The language lessons were deemed advisable in that the lucky lady was a Miss Anna Eyre Powell, whose father owned land in both Ireland and England: ‘a girl who is a dream from Ossian,’ Villiers wrote to Judith Gautier. After an exchange of letters Villiers took himself off to England, staying at the Grosvenor Hotel in ...”

“... as an escort. Instead, she resolved to maintain the Palatine court-in-exile, admitting to a former lady-in-waiting her surprise at the turn of events that had seen her ‘become a stateswoman, which of all things I have ever hated’. In her quest to secure Palatine restitution, Elizabeth attracted unswerving devotion from an older generation of ...”

“... baby’s father was charged but never stood trial.) Prison visits by upper-middle-class lady well-wishers, following Elizabeth Fry’s example, aimed to save the inmates from themselves: the Lady Visitors’ Association, founded in 1901 and active at Holloway, was ‘a body of earnest and devoted ladies with ...”

“... Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners. She looks like a nicely brought up young lady, with ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ part of her vocabulary. But in her first official portrait by Paul Emsley, unveiled in January, her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off. One ...”

“... took a spongebag, Hermione Lee reports, to the Booker dinner. In her letters she uses the dotty-lady schtick for two main purposes. It’s there to entertain and mollify her daughters, on whom she depended for all sorts of things: ‘Marina Warner came to lecture at the Highgate Institute on Tues – embarrassing as the members had made a clean sweep of all ...”

“... and failing to get published the manuscript of a novel, tellingly titled The Poor Man and the Lady. He wrote in his notebook, in October 1870: ‘Mother’s notion, & also mine: That a figure stands in our van with arm uplifted, to knock us back from any pleasant prospect we indulge in as probable.’ Nowadays, we read this metaphysically, in the ...”

“... little, as with the story of the liaison with Lola Montès, but it is pleasant to learn about the lady who announced her readiness to spend the night with Dumas on condition that he would first present her with a mongoose and an ant-eater (the former was not difficult, but where, asks Professor Hemmings, was Dumas to get hold of an ant-eater, short of ...”

“... compassion, or from some interested and unworthy motive. We are asked – ‘Why should not such a lady dance, if it gives her pleasure?’ We answer – ‘It should not give her ...”

“... beside the point – and Reed’s Night Train to Munich (1940) is a sort of ironic remake of The Lady Vanishes, complete with Margaret Lockwood and Naunton Wayne – but Hitchcock is interested in the nightmare of error rather than the death of charity. The Fallen Idol seems a little dated on a new viewing, its images and plot-points signalled too bluntly ...”

“... the pretensions and self-deceptions of those who practised it. St Louis was crawling with would-be lady writers. There was Mrs Stone, the director of the Modern Novel Club, who had written a pamphlet on ‘The Problem of Domestic Service’: ‘Intentions pile up before her like a mountain, and the sum of her energies is Zero!’ Mrs Hull, the wife of a coal ...”

“... and Princess: ‘Arbella Stuart’s notorious rebellion offered the example of yet another royal lady challenging James’s patriarchal and absolutist claims. Never mind that Arbella’s rebellion challenged the interests and claims of the Queen and Princess as well. The suppression of comparisons and distinctions between the women makes each chapter seem ...”