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“... 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 ...”

“... say, because a lot cannier, is the one on the upper floor of a village inn in Mary E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). The scheming protagonist ventures along it in search of the room occupied by her husband’s nephew, Robert, who is hot on her (bigamous) trail. ‘She stopped and looked at the number on the door. The key was in the lock, and her ...”

“... for William Paget, one of the King’s Councillors. Two years later, he managed to secure for Lady Cobham the cinnamon she wanted, but failed to source black satin from Venice. Writing to Lord Cobham in 1546 about the possibility of English merchant shipping being menaced by French warships out of Dieppe, he included ‘a little clout with needles’ for ...”

“... decomposition to the miracles they performed. Pilgrims flocked to relic shrines such as Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk or Santiago de Compostela in Galicia to experience these material manifestations of holiness as intimately as possible. They wanted not just to see the relics but to touch them and kiss them, and they hoped to take home something ...”

“... carried a weapon wherever he went, even on holiday: he used a hammer on a man trying to do an old lady out of her pennies in an arcade. They weren’t much older when they were shown, by their grinning father, their paternal grandfather’s dead body in its open casket. And they were still young – ‘all scared like little white rabbits’ – when they ...”

“... is thrilling but dangerous. Carney avoids places with frequent reports of muggings (‘an old lady carrying groceries hit on the head’) and keeps instead to the well-lit Riverside Drive, one of Harlem’s few affluent residential streets. He has an almost naive faith in the American Dream: ‘You came from one place but more important was where you ...”

“... sending material ‘of the most filthy and obscene character’ to Adelaide Fenton, a fashionable lady of Bath who was ‘not in the least acquainted’ with him, charged with the intention to ‘corrupt and debauch’ her. Colonel Forbes fled to France, and a £50 reward was offered for information leading to his arrest, together with a description: ‘about ...”

“... returned from India in 1619, Roe was still only 38. Thereafter accompanied by his intrepid wife, Lady Eleanor, he subsequently spent seven years during the 1620s as the Levant Company’s ambassador to the Ottoman court in Constantinople, followed by diplomatic missions to Denmark, Poland and the Holy Roman Empire amid the convulsions of the Thirty ...”

“... to look.’ Elizabeth Sampson, hauled before the bishop of London, put it more succinctly: Our Lady of Willesden ‘was a brent ars Elfe’. But as bishops went hunting through parishes for heresy, they also found people who held the old ways disturbingly close, with a fervent belief in the power of ritual words. In 1520, Henry Lillyngstone was charged by ...”

“... Ireland, against her husband’s wishes, is reminiscent of Isabel Archer’s in The Portrait of a Lady, when she travels to see the dying Ralph against her husband’s wishes:‘Was he very bad about your coming?’‘He made it very hard for me. But I don’t care.’‘Is it all over, then, between you?’‘Oh, no; I don’t think anything is ...”

“... Henry James writes of a very grand lady that she had ‘an air of keeping, at every moment, every advantage’. Paradoxically, the same would be true of the literary personality of Elias Canetti. Behind its approachable modesty, its avoidance of every publicity and image-making process, there is a loftiness, an assurance, a stance of absolute superiority ...”