“... early 19th-century Britain (the recently rediscovered diaries of Austen’s lesbian contemporary, Anne Lister, are an example) – one is struck not so much by the letters’ hastiness or triviality as by the passionate nature of the sibling bond they commemorate. Sororal or pseudo-sororal attachments are arguably the most immediately gratifying human ...”

“... imperial maritime future’. In pursuit of this, she follows the interlaced stories of the female knight Britomart, the maiden Florimell and the knight Marinell (a sea nymph’s son), whose grapplings with desire and chastity take place at coastal locations and whose problems are eased by the marriage between the Medway and ...”

“... brought before King William by Rahere the Jester revealed as Harold Godwin, and Hugh, the Saxon knight, kneeling to him. And ‘each time,’ writes Inglis, ‘the queer, crisp ripple of excitement tingled along my spine; the brimming tears which never quite fell, the chokey lump in the throat ... You see the same in children in the right mood listening to ...”

“... In her introduction to Records of Woman, Feldman agrees with other Romanticists such as Anne Mellor and Jerome McGann that Hemans ‘defies’, ‘undercuts’ and ‘criticises’ the feminine domestic ideal she appears to represent. In other words, she emerges from the 20th century less of a lady than was previously thought, and more of a ...”

“... faction, led by George Abbott as archbishop of Canterbury, and including James’s wife, Queen Anne, saw an opportunity to push their own anti-Spanish agenda by toppling Carr and elevating Buckingham. After a year of cupbearing, Buckingham was made gentleman of the bedchamber, knighted and given an annual allowance of £1000. In early 1616, when Carr and ...”

“... Anne Barton​ delivered the lectures on ‘The Shakespearean Forest’ that form the basis for this, her much anticipated last book, in Cambridge in 2003. The Clark Lectures were themselves the product of an extended reflection on the significance of Shakespeare’s imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays ...”

“... never more notably than in Renaut de Beaujeu’s Lai d’Ignauré, recounted by Bloch. Ignauré, a knight, makes love to all 12 wives of the 12 peers of the realm, and is discovered. The husbands castrate him, kill him, and dish up his genitals and heart in a stew for their wives’ table. When the women discover what they have done, they refuse ever to eat ...”

“... with sexual symbolism. You don’t have to know Francis Beaumont’s 17th-century parody The Knight of the Burning Pestle to see what a pestle and mortar signify. Yet Feaver goes out of his way to explain that there is no intended meaning in the pestle and mortar placed so surreally at Lucian’s mother’s feet in Large Interior, W9, the double portrait ...”

“... sex lives is jaw-dropping. In 1956, he went to Holkham Hall in Norfolk for the wedding of Lady Anne Coke to Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner. In her recent memoir, Lady in Waiting, Anne Glenconner describes her husband’s sexual proclivities, but also says that in those days girls of her class couldn’t possibly ...”

“... in the documentation of women’s lives’. But is the matter remedied by calling Ellis Cornelia Knight ‘Cornelius’? Or Helen Maria Williams ‘Helena’? Or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ‘Montague’? Or Cecilia ‘Cecelia’? Or Anne Ehrenpreis ‘Ehrenpries’? Or Patricia Köster ‘Koster’? Or Margarette Smith ...”

“... unsophisticated architect’s assistant, a new arrival in London from the country; and Henry Knight, an established, opinionated lawyer deeply at home in literary London (he also reviews books). Hardy’s fiction repeatedly stages not only the multiple courting of a heroine (Jude the Obscure switches genders and agency), but the tense sociology of ...”

“... seems to have been unconcerned about his lack of heirs. While he was devoted to his first wife, Anne of Bohemia, he may not have desired her sexually. His favourite and probable lover, Robert de Vere, also stayed childless through two marriages. Richard may have taken perverse comfort in his failure to beget a successor because it made him seem ...”

“... desire’ for Woodville, as Penn notes, and ‘used to getting what he wanted’. Penn opts for an Anne Boleyn theory of events – in Woodville, Edward ‘met his match’. If he wanted to sleep with her, ‘he needed to marry her first’. Marrying a commoner was a huge gamble for a usurper, however, and is the reason the ceremony was held in secret: the ...”

“... of the New Comedy of Menander. But comic dramatists also often seem to have been attracted to what Anne Barton has called Cratylic names – those which appear to endorse the view of Plato’s Cratylus that there is an intrinsic relationship between name and nature. Aristophanes has Dicaeopolis (‘just city’) and Lysistrata (‘disbander of ...”

“... lead onto the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s as well as a small lightbox room with dayglo scenes by Nick Knight, but one really needs to go all the way in the opposite direction, through the 1980s and some unlikely in-between rooms (including a round-the-wall timeline that ought to be at the start) and then backwards through the 1960s, 1950s, 1940s, 1930s and ...”