“... Devonshire, would have enjoyed the complimentary references to his scandalously flaunted mistress Lady Penelope Rich in several of Byrd’s songs written around this time.And so Byrd’s public life is refracted through the images of these English noblemen. He was the much honoured and privileged royal servant to Elizabeth and James for more than half a ...”

“... giving the experience a beginning and an end. Except that it’s never over, cancer, until the fat lady pops her clogs. No one is ever cured of cancer, except technically. Even if I were to pass the magic five-year survival post, or go into remission, the possibility of a return of the cancer cells will always be there. Binary oppositions turn ...”

“... Dos Passos went to a cabaret near Taksim in the early 1920s,’ King writes, he found a Russian lady on a stage doing a peasant dance, two English girls crooning in knee socks and sweaters, a troupe of Greek acrobats … In 1928, however, city planners cleaned up part of the square and created a bronze and marble monument to the republic’s founders ...”

“... Though she seemed unimpressed by the sole privilege she’d been awarded as her country’s first lady, Indian newspapers reported that she was willing to return to her husband’s side, if he asked. In May, unhappy that she hadn’t received a satisfactory answer and upset by the use of her maiden name in the official response, she submitted a second ...”

“... dissuades Jim from picking up a magazine on an unaccustomed day, because she has noticed that the lady in the railway station kiosk, obviously smitten with the handsome young man, gets herself dolled up for his visits and will feel at a disadvantage if he surprises her when she’s looking less than her best. Empathy is the antipodes of trauma, though this ...”

“... carefully. For it falls to us to perceive if their bond is strong enough to cross together. This lady is reluctant to accept it, but her bond with her husband was simply too weak. Let her look into her heart, then dare say my judgment that day was in error. If this ferryman could be described as enigmatic he is an enigma of an entirely transparent sort; he ...”

“... the road), the mild threat of the band of teenagers gathered there from dusk, ‘Jeanine, the old lady who lives across from the bus stop’, the church square, the muddy paths that lead out of the village into the vast fields of wheat and rape beyond, the impoverished households as well as the more middle-class ones, the factory on the edge of the village ...”

“... or even in Livingstone’s case religious – were often financed by private individuals (by Lady Franklin, for example) or by societies, but they were increasingly presented in the media as undertaken for the glory of the nation. In the crudest sense, it has to be a British expedition that gets to the Pole first or discovers the North-West Passage. But ...”

“... by his marriage to a non-Jewish woman, found Jalowicz a place to stay with his former cleaning lady. Ida Kahnke, who worked as a toilet attendant, was pleased to have the ten marks Schindler paid her to put up Jalowicz, and it was at her house that Jalowicz met Mitko, the Bulgarian. She soon moved on to lodge with a Frau Schulz, who realised that Jalowicz ...”

“... for your eastern hostage, extol in basalt Your father, praise with white festoons the goddess your lady; And for your death which will be mine prepare An encasement as if of solid blood.Whether or not such buildings and monuments end up being commissioned and built, the speaker is able to present his identity and art as inextricably intertwined with the family ...”

“... after he was released from prison. ‘Everywhere I go, people are asking about you.’ The first lady, Jeannette Kagame, told Karegeya’s wife that he had only himself to blame. ‘We tried to warn you about Fred Rwigyema and you didn’t listen to us. If my husband wasn’t a tolerant man, you could be dead by now.’He soon was. An inquest in South Africa ...”

“... moral cowardice,’ Searls writes, but it’s such a good story: more true than real, like Lady Macbeth. The stories about the Rorschach getting it right are almost invariably about disturbed people caught out by the test, only extremely rarely about a healthy person being exonerated. There’s a reason for this: in the 1980s, a group of psychologists ...”

“... in a detailed little book, vividly illustrated, which he published in 1665. The shrine of Our Lady of Mentorella, today administered by the Congregation of the Resurrection, still commemorates Kircher, as well as Constantine and St Eustachius. Pilgrims and walkers still climb the hill to see the church, enjoy its splendid views and buy mugs with ...”

“... North African ancestry seem to have lived in York, including a woman now known as Ivory Bangle Lady, who was buried in a sarcophagus together with bangles made of Whitby jet and African ivory. The remains of a nearly complete skeleton found in a box labelled ‘Beachy Head’ in Eastbourne Museum were recently identified as belonging to a woman from ...”

“... She created the famous iridescent gown, covered in beetle wings, in which Ellen Terry played Lady Macbeth and in which Sargent painted her in 1889. The picture, ‘the sensation of the year’ according to Terry’s diary, shows her snakelike in her glistening robe holding the crown of Scotland above her head, an embodiment of dangerous female ...”