“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Nancy was an only child, and when her parents separated she moved with her mother to London, where Lady Emerald Cunard, as Maud later styled herself, became a leading literary socialite. It is one thing to be bored by steamers and convoys and trains; another to be bored because one’s father owns them. What things ‘mean to’ Cunard is the question that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... A startling print by Caspar von Regensburg, c.1485, portrays the Venus-like figure of Frau Minne (Lady Love) as a nude dominatrix trampling on a hapless lover’s heart. With her right hand she impales another heart on a spear, while her left pierces one with a sword. Surrounding the goddess, 16 more hearts are roasted in flames, guillotined, crushed in a ...”

“... Parliament. Johnson, if he has a working majority, will have less need to bypass Parliament. So Lady Hale, or her successor, can do her worst, and he will probably be fine with it, as he was ultimately fine with her doing her worst last time round. It is a Corbyn minority government that will feel the pinch of Johnson’s botched prorogation. Second, a ...”

“... Canal from St Mark’s which is one of the city’s defining landmarks, was built to thank Our Lady of Health for the end of the plague of 1630-31. Santa Rosalia, the patron saint of Palermo, delivered that city a few years before in 1624-25; she was processed through the streets last year in the hope she would defend it again, against Covid-19. St ...”

“... a birthday in her absence, hardly suggests a close connection. In herself she’s a generic old lady, evoked largely by her possessions: a tarnished copper kettle, her tissue-holder shaped like a hen. There are usually more atoms whizzing around, even in what we’re used to calling the nuclear family. Collectively, Phillips’s choices have the effect of ...”

“... for a particularly precocious and cynical 13- year-old – when he got up he proved to be a young lady, somewhat over twenty. I wonder whether I can be bothered to go back to that establishment at all.She travelled around France and Italy, where she seems to have spent most of her time swimming, visiting museums and churches, and looking at soldiers in ...”

“... One day a woman conducting genealogical research called Clifton. This ‘thin-voiced white lady’ said she didn’t remember the names of Clifton’s ancestors. Clifton replied: ‘Who remembers the names of the slaves? Only the children of slaves.’ After an awkward conversation, the woman ‘sends the history she has compiled and in it are her ...”

“... an open line.Although, at the outset, Ross announced that the New Yorker was not meant for the old lady from Dubuque, he always made sure that out-of-towners could read it without pain. It was, he’d say, a family magazine. According to Brendan Gill – a hostile judge – Ross’s morality was shaped by ‘the ugly commonplaces of almost a hundred years ...”