“... Lent.In 1566, Antwerp’s fragile religious accord cracked. Protestants attacked the Church of Our Lady, and within the hour, every church and monastery in the city was besieged by image-breakers. The mapmaker Abraham Ortelius, whose business depended on Antwerp’s cosmopolitanism, mourned that ‘the churches looked as though the devil had been at work there ...”

“... Spanish flu in her journal, slipping it in as a joke between Lytton Strachey’s sore finger and Lady Murray’s invitation to lunch, when the death rate in parts of London was higher than it had been in the trenches and people who had been well at breakfast were dead by bedtime and deadly as plutonium to everyone who saw them in between, but I think I ...”

“... sense of this connection, but perhaps sense isn’t what she needs. It’s worth noting that the lady who told the original story comes to think that accepting that ‘contradictory ideas’ can both be true is a sign of ‘starting to grow up’.Mr Wilder and Me brings these perspectives together in interesting ways. The frame story is told by Calista, a ...”

“... children, is a map copied by one of the royal infants from the jigsaws used by their governess, Lady Charlotte Finch, to teach them geography. It indicates, with affecting but spurious precision, the territorial boundaries of the 12 tribes of Israel, in what the children, like almost everyone else in the 18th and 19th centuries, called the Holy Land. When ...”

“... little attention in Handley’s account. And they read: aloud or silently, by moon or candlelight. Lady Anne Clifford had devout material read to her in bed by her servants, who noted down ‘things new and old, Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors’ on small pieces of paper which were then pinned around her bedstead ...”

“... political affiliation, friend or foe, guilt or innocence. Mrs Coyle, Michael’s Catholic cleaning lady, whose son is holed up in police custody, ‘visibly unfurls’ on hearing Cushla’s Gaelic name; at the other end of the spectrum, Victor, one of Michael’s middle-class friends, sits ‘peering at her through the smoke from the cigar he was toking ...”

“... a world of scurrying maids, laughing guards, courtiers ‘jealously discussing a posting’, a lady scuttling out of an equerry’s chamber.Lucrezia thinks in metaphors of embroidery and painting because they’re what she knows best. Outside the cathedral on the morning of her wedding, she notices the way ‘the campanile has stitched itself to the summer ...”

“... and Roussel (‘Ginger’) de Bailleul. Roussel – the hero of Duggan’s Lady for Ransom – took part in the Byzantine campaign of 1071 against the invading Turks, which ended in disastrous defeat at Manzikert, but got away with his men and used the collapse of Byzantine power to set up an independent kingdom in what is now ...”

“... As if irritated by my confusion – the situation is so clear to him – he shrugs. ‘Look, lady, these things happen.’ I stare at this agent of fate incredulously. She wants to know where I keep my jewellery. ‘I don’t have any,’ I say, thinking of the watch, gold bracelet and earrings that I am wearing, that I wore that other day, too, and ...”

“... a world which in My Son’s Story is kept at arm’s length. At the same time, the white lady who becomes involved in black politics through her concern for her domestic, and who finds herself giving sanctuary to an armed fugitive, is almost a stock character in South African fiction. The truly unconventional relationship in this novel is that ...”

“... Lambeth, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury, applying this principle to the problems of Palestine. Lady Fisher, supported by her husband, had seemed to condone an act of Arab terrorism (the bombing of a bus containing children) by talking about ‘brave men... acting for their own country’. Woolf won’t have such acts justified, whether those who commit ...”

“... Act when she rode cackling through the streets of Cape Town, naked on a donkey in homage to Lady Godiva, holding a placard which read: ‘Ban the Immorality Act.’ It was a horrible, wonderful sight, and a day of great joy and celebration. When I arrived at Drum in 1967 there were still some major figures in place. There was Stanley Motjuwadi, a writer ...”

“... from a Waugh novel: ‘Sligger’ Urquhart and Harold Freese-Penefather ‘with his companion a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Norway’. There is an odd ambiguity dividing Hailsham’s pride in academic achievement and in things done for himself by himself and the glow of famous people’s attention and the gentle thwack of name against floor. The wearing ...”

“... towards Jaques. To his complacent observation, ‘Yes, I have gained my experience,’ the young lady retorted: ‘And your experience makes you sad. I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.’ In the past, and perhaps in the present too, for most men ‘experience’ will have meant what they learned in the course of their ...”

“... age of 20, when he returned to Oxford after the war, as an undergraduate, he was accompanied by a lady of 45 from whom he was not to be parted until her death more than thirty years later.This liaison has been variously interpreted, but there is no doubt – and Wilson has none – that what began as the finding of a substitute mother was soon complicated by ...”