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“... the old ones, Amis exacts authorial revenge by calling them Trevor and Tracy and giving Trevor a beard.) Each of the old people embodies a version of the uneasy relationship between past and present selves, summed up in Marigold, who at 73 thinks she can pass for 60 but actually looks like ‘a very, very well-preserved 73’. In the gap between memory and ...”

“... her father and brother, occupied separate apartments in the same house. About a mile down the hill Mary Shelley occupied herself by making fair copies of Don Juan. (Byron’s convenience is our loss, because he made many further revisions and improvements in the early cantos, in copying them himself.) With Mary Shelley was ...”

“... was an embarrassment to him. He now spent entire days at the mosque. He skipped classes, grew a beard and began proselytising among his friends. In early 1999, he alarmed Sengün by saying he was going to wage jihad because there was no greater honour than to die for Allah. Meanwhile his family was growing increasingly concerned. His father threatened to ...”

“... rather be torn apart by wild horses than ever again say the Catholic Mass. In December 1553, Queen Mary newly enthroned, the alderman entered his parish church to find Herne at the altar, in his old vestments and all ready to go. Speechless, the alderman simply pointed to the spectacle before him; ‘but parson herne openlye in churche spak alowde onto hym. It ...”

“... Sixteen Sonnets by John Bampfylde, since they were emphatically dedicated to ‘Miss PALMER’. Mary Palmer, Sir Joshua’s niece, had been living more or less permanently with him since 1773 and became indispensable to her bachelor uncle, running his household and often acting as his amanuensis. Intelligent, handsome and lively, with musical and literary ...”

“... female in Britain in the last century was not animated by impulses of this kind. On 10 March 1914 Mary Raleigh Richardson, an educated, high-minded art student (who died a year before Larkin wrote his poem) made an early morning visit to the National Gallery, smashed the glass covering The Rokeby Venus, and slashed the canvas – a protest, she ...”

“... to his brief time as its king – he was married to Elizabeth’s half-sister and predecessor, Mary I, between 1554 and her death in 1558. He and Mary had restored papal sovereignty over the English Church, lost Calais to the French and – to his later regret – improved the English navy. (The galleon they launched as ...”

“... year, however, with the arrival of Howard K. Beale.Beale was a disciple of the historian Charles Beard, who taught that political ideology was a mask for economic self-interest. Beale had recently published The Critical Year, in which he followed Beard in viewing the Civil War not as a struggle over slavery but as a second ...”

“... instance, gives a sense of the Frari Madonna’s grave atmosphere, especially in its handling of Mary’s grasp on the child; and the Uffizi Lamentation points forward, in its very different medium, to the economy of touch and implacable pictorial silence of San Zaccaria. Or from an earlier phase – another loan of improbable generosity, given the ...”

“... or the human body, led to a state of exhaustion and burnout which the US neurologist George Miller Beard diagnosed as ‘neurasthenia’. Beard defined the condition as a depletion of nervous energy and explained it by analogy to an electrical current: when a circuit is overloaded with light bulbs, it eventually reaches a ...”

“... severely penalised any behaviour that compromised masculine identity: shaving off one’s beard, and thereby appearing feminine, received a worse punishment than soliciting another man for sex. Heterosexual attraction could usually be fitted into Christian schemes of salvation, albeit uneasily. Most of the difficulties, it seems, were caused by ...”

“... like attics, basements and sheds. ‘Dirt is matter out of place’ is the celebrated dictum of Mary Douglas. A teenager’s clothing scattered about the room; a pair of shoes on the dining-room table. And what we regard as dirt someone else may prize; dirt is not natural but cultural. The move from the material to the metaphorical and cultural was often a ...”

“... sighted Martin walks straight past her to the luscious young Molly (to receive a rude awakening); Mary, too, realises that if she ever was, she is now far from being ‘the beautiful dark woman of Ballinatone’. In the hands of a different playwright, this cruel disillusionment would be the end of it, and the subsequent decision of the couple to return to ...”

“... paintings of Lytton Strachey and David Garnett, from 1913 and 1915. The former’s glasses and beard are painted bright yellow in a strange experiment; the latter, a topless portrait, has a mother-of-pearl luminescence to its skin tones, the small dark dots of Garnett’s eyes and set mouth revealing a wariness beneath the fleshy complacency. These are ...”

“... travel, and live off the fat of the land. If Tudor is measured on a scale, and scored by size of beard, love of jousting and trouble with wives, Charles Brandon would come near the top, second only to the king he served. The subtitle of Steven Gunn’s scholarly biography describes its subject as ‘Henry VIII’s Closest Friend’. What a prospect of ...”