“... 18th century, had a robust attitude towards medical ethics. Introduced to smallpox inoculation by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had seen it used in Turkey (scrapings from the pocks of the infected were dabbed onto a lightly bleeding cut), she was keen to use it on her own daughters. But she wanted to test it on someone else first, so she tried it on six ...”

“... into streams and how to kill sentries noiselessly from behind.’ There would be no quarter for ‘lady finger-breakers’ joining up to any amazon corps. The drivel pouring out of Hamburg was easily discounted, yet there must have been not a few who remembered how the Germans treated francs-tireurs and their protectors in 1914. At Dinant, in Belgium, there is ...”

“... a decade later it was the NSA that detailed the dénouement in a series of terse despatches: ‘lady ace’ – the Ambassador’s helicopter – ‘is on the roof. he states that he will load 25 pax and that this will leave 45 remaining hence they need more choppers.’ During the Cultural Revolution, the NSA listened in as Red Guards quoted Mao to one ...”

“... fan, a schmoozer. Imagine if Orson Welles had never bothered to direct films again after The Lady from Shanghai, just bullshitted on talk shows, reliving his great moments. Like Welles, Stan Lee’s great moments were beset by authorship disputes. Lee’s particular emphasis on Spider-Man as Marvel’s signature creation may have had something to do with ...”

“... A young English publisher on holiday in France comes across a compatriot, a ‘genteel’ elderly lady who lost her nest-egg in the 1929 slump. The rainy day has come and she wants to sell her story. It is, the publisher discovers, an exciting one. Fanny, her testament records, was born in 1857 and raised as the daughter of Duke Hopwood, proprietor of the ...”

“... statutes for a headmaster, an usher and 70 ‘poor and needy’ scholars, much more typical was Lady Katherine Berkeley’s foundation at Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire two years later, with endowments of £17 a year to provide for a schoolmaster, two scholars, and free lessons for anyone who wanted them. These less ambitious institutions have usually ...”

“... step was the publication in the Illustrated London News on 24 February of an engraving of the ‘Lady with the Lamp’. In early May she visited Balaclava and was received by cheering soldiers. On 13 May she collapsed and was laid low with fever. Her case was said to be as bad as any; recovery took weeks. What caused her illness? Bostridge is too ...”

“... mechanisms of elite influence retained their power. It was Fielding’s well-connected cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who engineered his youthful entrée into the theatre world; she was the dedicatee of his first play, and the driving force behind his burlesque of the Dunciad, which survives only in manuscript draft. (It may be that this particular ...”

“... a certain institutional comedy of shame was set in plaster. Freud didn’t get a look in, but Our Lady did, and we all lived as if the turmoil of life was ordained by higher beings. Priests were sometimes engaged to preside over pledges and to maintain the status quo in a bad marriage, but I found it hard – even harder, I think, than my brothers did – to ...”

“... lords took the opportunity to spell it out. Bogdanor cites the storm warnings given by Lord Steyn, Lady Hale and Lord Hope. Hope, one of the Scottish law lords, said: ‘Parliamentary sovereignty is no longer, if it ever was, absolute … Step by step, gradually but surely, the English principle of the absolute legislative sovereignty of Parliament … is ...”

“... a range of small kindnesses, like the two Islington wives who got ‘a pipkyn of pottage’ from Lady Taylbushe and some alms from local notables, but still had to send their children to ‘good houses, to aske a mese of pottage or such other victualls’. Nobody would give credit to someone ‘on the parish’, so they could never get off it; charity was a ...”

“... or so, after which the king had her stuffed. Exotic beasts didn’t always find such favour. When Lady Lisle gave Anne Boleyn a monkey in 1534, she wasn’t pleased. ‘As to touching your monkey,’ John Hussee wrote to Lisle the following year, ‘of a truth, madam, the queen loveth no such beasts nor can scarce abide the sight of them.’ What happened to ...”

“... facelessness; her photographs, which show figures blurred by movement, could be one. ‘Lady with a Book’ (1946) Of the exhibition’s omissions, the saddest to my mind is Lady with a Book, from 1946, not least because it upsets notions about her artistic decline. In some respects, it’s a conventional ...”

“... Sant’Andrea della Valle, or is it the clean mallet-percussion of John Pawson’s Abbey of Our Lady of Nový Dvůr? There’s an organist in the loft; what is he playing? The concerto then becomes a twenty-minute exploration of this space: walking into a church, and slowly moving closer and closer, past various side chapels and distractions, towards the ...”

“... in writing songs, and telling stories, about how great it is to be a young, hot, dollar-savvy lady-adventurer, there is still nothing about being an older, stoic, domestic hero, quietly mending and re-mending the world, every day.(Add Middlemarch to Moran’s reading list, fuck it, to everyone’s reading list.) It is astonishing to me, and even ...”