“... 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 ...”

“... or fresh-cut willow hurdle set all over with paradise fruits cut through – first through a beard of golden fibre and then through wet flesh greener than greengages or purpler than grapes – or say that the knife had caught a tatter or flag of the skin and laid it flat across the flesh – and then within all a sluggish corner drop of black or purple ...”

“... were learning their lessons in Africa or the West Indies); that Charlemagne had a flowing white beard and cared about education (but he may have been most popular because his coronation date, 800, was so easy to remember); that Philip Augustus was a good king because he beat the Germans; that Catherine de Médicis was a bad woman because she killed so many ...”

“... until Christmas Eve. Then At that time of tiding, He prayed to highest heaven. Let Mother Mary guide him Towards some house or haven. The effect of the bob-and-wheel is striking; it wraps up the stanza or section it is concluding with a decorative comment or summary that stresses its own difference from the routine of the alliterative verse to which ...”

“... bags under his eyes as if he hasn’t been sleeping well lately, and a lightweight, almost fluffy beard and moustache. The top right-hand corner of the painting gives a date – 1603, perfectly consonant with the clothes, the style of the painting and the lettering employed for the word ‘ANo’ which precedes it – but there is no indication of who this ...”

“... interested solely in the historical dramas, and supreme among them was the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in the great hall of Fotheringay Castle. The momentous event, the inevitability of which was conveyed in a way that no history book could rival, unfolded in distinct tableaux, in the third and last of which ...”

“... linked only by a concern for their child’s welfare. So, apart from being, in some way, Joseph, Mary and Jesus, they might not be such an unusual type of family.Most of the time David, who was judged to be five on arrival, comes across as a non-symbolic little boy, interested in football, sometimes affectionate, sometimes petulant. Like many children, he ...”

“... of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; though in a lengthy account of the sisters’ attempts to beard the male-dominated publishing establishment, Mullan misses the opportunity to relate this to the intricate cross-gendering in the novels themselves. Gender-spotting was a common pursuit among reviewers of anonymous or pseudonymous works. R.D. Blackmore’s ...”

“... by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, Attlee whispered to his brother: ‘Do we have to grow a beard to join this show?’ The confident pre-1914 left, he later reflected, had been too rigid in its scientific approach to social problems and altogether ‘too Webby’. Socialist eggheads remained a source of exasperation into the late 1930s, by which time ...”

“... to ‘NWA’. A few minutes later, I am a witness as George Hamilton, the actor and walker, or beard, to Hollywood matrons of a certain age, takes the air outside Paddington’s, an ersatz tea shoppe on fashionable Melrose Avenue. A blonde whom the checkout tabloids would probably call George’s ‘mystery gal pal’ takes him by the bespoke elbow and ...”

“... Waterbury, Connecticut. ‘Mabel’, as she liked to be known to her friends – her real name was Mary – had various crushes on her fellow students (‘Carrie and I lay on my bed all afternoon and either fought or spooned’) which made her fascinating to herself and popular with her fellows, young and old, and of both sexes. Of course there were, so to ...”

“... abuse. During one argument about justification by faith, the Bishop of La Cava wrenched at the beard of the Cretan Bishop of Chironissa and Melopotamos, who had said that he was either a knave or a fool for sounding a bit like Martin Luther on justification. It is amazing that anything got done at all, and indeed more than once the whole event nearly ended ...”

“... In the absence of his wife Dickens’s table was ‘gracefully’ headed by his eldest daughter Mary, or Mamie. One of his annual letters to his old Lausanne friend de Cerjat describes her as a ‘capital housekeeper’, delegating ‘certain appointed duties to her sister and her aunt ... they are all three devotedly attached’. A year later he tells de ...”

“... fed a dog’ from one of Vanessa Bell’s plates, and characterised Lytton Strachey’s beard as ‘an extension of his personality in the direction of doubt’.) In these letters she often ascribes her troubles to the demon Wells; but her temperament was formed earlier, as Victoria Glendinning’s biography (1987) shows. She was not born Rebecca ...”

“... was no real Venice: the real Venice was – and had always been – the Venice of postcards.’ On Mary McCarthy on Venice: ‘Except she’d taken it a step further and said that the thing about Venice was that it was impossible to say anything about Venice that had not been said before, “including this statement”.’ The work of Gilbert and George he ...”