“... an imposing figure, tall, lean tending to cadaverous, with steely grey eyes and a fierce-looking beard. Photographs from his expeditions show him in jungle clearings, hollow-eyed with heat and hunger, wearing a stetson, jodhpur-like trousers and tall leather boots. He looks like an Edwardian Indiana Jones, or some strange dystopian scoutmaster living ...”

“... to the Consideration of All True Lovers of Our Church and Constitution might look like a benign, beard-and-sandals kind of title. It wasn’t. In 1705, a memorial was a petition and there was nothing humble about this one. In 56 snarling pages, it denounced dissenters from the established Church, excoriated moderates who promoted toleration and hinted at the ...”

“... notorious Ruxton case, involving the dismembered bodies of two women, Isabella Ruxton and her maid Mary Rogerson. Ruxton’s husband, Buck, a local doctor, was convicted of the murder. Yet only in the US has the field extended to the point where it is now not unusual to have forensic entomologists on both the defence and prosecution sides. Partly this is ...”

“... a friend: ‘She had one rare trait that kept me interested: she never spoke of herself at all.’ Mary McCarthy’s assessment of Bishop – ‘I envy the mind hiding in her words, like an “I” counting up to a hundred waiting to be found’ – captures this blend of stealth and appeal, of patience and need. Bishop plays strange games; during hide and ...”

“... in Northern waters ending ignominiously, with the capture of the heavy-gun Renaissance warship Mary Willoughby by the outdated longships of Hector Maclean of Duart off the Shetlands in 1533. Before long, however, one begins to wonder whether Rodger is not falling over backwards to be fair. The Scots, we are told repeatedly, with little evidence to back it ...”

“... might have been jealous. The old man’s skin, his slightly rheumy eye and the white hair of his beard are wonderfully realised. Rubens tends to make use of a repertoire of effective conventions (the marks for an eyelid, folds in the skin, cheeks and so on) and unites them in a springy dance of brushstrokes. Van Dyck observes finer detail, gives more ...”

“... a bull of a man whose mobile, red lower lip – pushed forward above an abundant, well combed beard – suggests that he has been caught mid-word. His complaint in a letter to Cosimo de’ Medici – to whom the portrait was being sent as a present – that the treatment of his red coat would have been less sketchy had the painter been paid more ...”

“... taken inside the Scriptorium, Murray looks like the quintessential Oxford scholar, with long beard, academic cap and all the accoutrements of the Victorian sage. But he was an outsider, a nonconformist Scot who left school at fourteen yet somehow managed to learn 24 languages; he had to fight for academic recognition. At various points in the ...”

“... large inexpressive apology for a face’ and a fidgety stage manner, always ‘plucking at his beard’ (he was clean-shaven, so this is metaphorical) and punctuating his punchlines with an interjection of ‘Hey-hey what!’ We see him as Major Sturgeon, a self-deluding old booby in The Mayor of Garrett; as Zachary Fungus in The Commissary; as Dr ...”

“... that in the 1890s Faure sold out his entire Degas holdings.In 1884, Degas painted his friend Mary Cassatt, then in her thirties; she was aghast that he made her look twenty years older. Five years earlier, he had begun painting Madame Dietz-Monnin, a rich boiler heiress married to a prominent politician. But their interchange was called off after what ...”

“... visible. In his youth, Verdi demonstrated his sympathy with Mazzini’s republicanism by growing a beard, and by naming his children after classical republican heroes (though he hedged his bets somewhat by calling his daughter Virginia Maria Luigia, the last two names being those of the Duchess of Parma). The two men met in London in 1847, although little ...”

“... during the meeting of their halimote (assembly); these crimes included fiddling with one’s beard, or telling a fellow baker he had a thick skull. As a member of the Mercers’ Company, More would leave his home and cross Cheapside to enter the Hospital of St Thomas of Acre, where he represented the Merchant Adventurers in negotiations with Antwerp over ...”

“... a stroke), but they are united by the bright flossy orange that infuses Lecourt’s beard and burnishes his side, and which constitutes the ageing Sickert’s hair and beard, pouring down his napkin as he sits eating from a bowl of berries in front of a window. This second painting is magnificent. Sickert took ...”

“... born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is documented, nor the date of their marriage, which was sometime in the later 1550s. The fact that John’s father had leased land at Snitterfield owned by ...”

“... character – ‘[he] hides his lower jaw in a delicate gold filigree of almost masculine beard’ – and sought out writers who struck him more as ‘plain folks’. He found a kindred spirit in Edward Thomas, then a struggling prose writer, who considered him the ‘greatest friend’ of his life (not long before Thomas enlisted in 1915, he ...”