“... 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 ...”

“... given the reverse emphasis in most discussions of his subject, is by no means disproportionate. Mary McCarthy described the fell consequences of getting the proportions wrong in her essay ‘My Confession’. Having airily declared, at a fellow-travellers’ publishing party, that Trotsky should be allowed his day in court, she found her signature ...”

“... As I overtake a worn blue Audi estate, I look sideways and see Dave’s face and grizzled beard. We exchange incoherent signs, pull in a little later on the hard shoulder, and agree to meet at Arrochar on Loch Long for a snack and petrol. Shortly before noon I’m standing in the filling station letting the fuel run into my tank and staring fondly up ...”

“... however. His family were staunchly Protestant, and during the turbulent Catholic ascendancy under Mary Tudor they sent him to the Continent. At the age of about ten he arrived in Calvinist Geneva, where he spent two years in the household of John Bodley, an Exeter merchant. From this experience he gained a good knowledge of French, an early familiarity with ...”

“... had. Afterwards, fearful that he would frighten people with his gaunt face, he grew a Whitmanesque beard and referred to himself as a ‘lean Santa Claus’. He crammed his house in Connecticut with old advertising signs of the sort he had photographed in his youth and with bottle caps and debris. He bought a Polaroid camera, and when the company learned of ...”

“... own animadversions and even novelistic touches. The Reverend the Honourable R. Henley, vicar of St Mary’s, Putney, was ‘an old man – well over sixty – moustache and beard slightly stained from pipe smoking’. Seeing grubby boys playing cricket in the streets of Deptford using their caps and coats as wickets, one ...”

“... almost touching the roof of a lofty church, he was obviously drawing the familiar parallel between Mary and the Church itself. Again, when the room of the Virgin Annunciate was decorated with statues of Moses and Isaiah, these figures were included for a specific reason: Moses was a famous type or prefiguration of Christ, while Isaiah prophesied: ‘Behold, a ...”

“... The phone rings at 10.15. It’s Mary, from Campaign Atom: the Cruise convoy’s been sighted, fifteen miles from Greenham. It’s on its way back. Everyone on the network who wants to go down, go now. My heart sinks. So does Pat’s, when I tell her. We both have exam papers to mark, and meetings the next day; and the memory of a fruitless watch for the convoy three nights ago, at a roundabout on the Oxford ring-road, sours the prospect ...”

“... Confederate states. It wasn’t until the late 1850s that he became a planter: through his wife, Mary Custis, the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, Lee inherited several hundred enslaved people scattered across a number of Custis family estates in Virginia. He decided to improve production by transferring and hiring out slaves, regardless of family ...”

“... family safely out of Sodom before destroying the city; in the New Testament, Gabriel appears to Mary to tell her she will become the mother of God and another, unnamed angel forewarns Joseph about the Massacre of the Innocents.Many angels are also famous saints. The town of Saint-Raphaël lies close to Saint-Tropez, but the two resorts’ patrons belong to ...”

“... States, and an engraving of his face – framed between his bushy hair and a bird’s nest of a beard – gazed reproachfully from newspapers throughout the north. Before the raid on Harpers Ferry, he had seemed no more than a crackpot or a zealot to the few people who knew him. But as millions of Americans learned of the man who was ready to die for the ...”

“... This one also has L.H.O.O.Q. written on it, and is signed by Duchamp, but has no moustache or beard, just is a reproduction of the painting. Duchamp has added the word rasée, ‘shaven’, as if to make the original into the later work, and to make us see the now invisible hair not only on the copy but on Da Vinci’s original. The amazing Duchamp ...”

“... of the behaviour of this opinionated, charming, witty connoisseur with his immaculate silken beard? If so, Samuels seems not to know about it. The sharpest observations on Berenson in this book came from Mrs Berenson – above all from a letter in which she warned Roger Fry about the difficulties of resuming good relations with her husband. It begins by ...”

“... long. Nothing needs to be explained in a world where anything can be real. Bluebeard’s blue beard, which causes his future wife to loathe him, is simply that, not a symbol to be decoded. The illustrations, which embed meditative damsels in the haunted thickets of Burne-Jones and the sinister bestiaries of Wagner’s Ring, deepen the oneiric mood.One of ...”

“... in the presence of several hundred Sunday School children, publicly burnt (they set fire to his beard) in the precinct. The clergy had condemned him as a usurper and heretic who had ‘paganised’ the Christmas festival, installing himself at its centre ‘like a cuckoo in the nest’. Lévi-Strauss (to whom paradoxes are what whales were to Captain ...”