“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”