“... 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 ...”

“... Rainy Dawn’ and dated 1945, which struck me then and since as the equal of Chekhov’s ‘Lady with Lapdog’.We are on a Volga steamer. It’s night. The boat puts in for three hours at one of Paustovsky’s tiny nowhere places (what’s the Russian for ‘podunk’?) called Navoloki. Just long enough to allow the central figure, a Major Kuzmin, who ...”

“... experimental novels. Born in 1903 into a well-to-do West Country family, she was a student at Lady Margaret Hall, graduating in 1927. After Oxford, she moved to London, and in 1931 into a flat at 107 Lansdowne Road, Notting Hill. There’s a rare sighting of her, a diminutive figure flanked by solemn men in suits, in a photograph in the March 1933 issue ...”

“... contrition! We are druv’ to it. John Bull will have it so. Tu l’as voulu John Dandin! And his lady still more! Let us toe the line, my brothers, and invest with care. Londres vaut bien une messe.’ Then catch at your own coat-tails. ‘An unpardonable digression! I am like a bus driver who is perpetually jumping down to fight some passer-by. I apologise ...”

“... Russell in his autobiography gives no casus belli, but there was disharmony from the start between Lady Russell and Barnes, who liked to instruct her on how to bring up her three-year-old child. The unforeseeable tipping point turned out to be her habit of knitting (for the allied troops) during her husband’s lectures. She received an official reprimand from ...”

“... of pain about the postwar decline of ‘civilisation’ in a country where ‘the more one’s a lady or a gentleman the less chance one has.’Both radical hopes and reactionary fears were confounded by events, and the differences between Labour and Tory were often narrower than they seemed at the time. The Attlee government created the NHS, but Churchill ...”

“... set during the First World War, the other a comedy thriller in the manner of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. But both are elevated by the light, ironic style of Pressburger’s script and by the hulking presence of Conrad Veidt, another exile from the Nazis, who had appeared in German silent movies. (Veidt wasn’t Jewish but, as Caitlin McDonald writes ...”

“... bright’, was brought up an only child in Gloucestershire, the daughter of ‘a real Cheltenham lady’. ‘They were very different people, my parents.’ On holiday in the Pyrenees in 1962 the differences are not on show, except perhaps in his mother’s sideways glance away from the camera. His father, a keen birdwatcher, has his field glasses round his ...”