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“... their labour power into higher wages, a better quality of life and a mountain of consumer goods? Katherine French provides a new angle on these questions by considering domestic life and material culture in London, as revealed by the abundant evidence in wills. Late medieval Londoners, she argues, had to ‘learn to live with more’. The increase of ...”

“... woman from Co. Cork and her lady’s maid. They come to us from the journals that the young woman, Katherine Wilmot, kept during her travels on the Continent in 1801-3 and to Russia from 1805 to 1807, and sent home to her family. Parts of these journals have already been published, in Thomas Sadleir’s An Irish Peer on the Continent (1920) and in Lady ...”

“... the Canterbury Tales he wrote about small birds who ‘slepen al the nyght with open ye’. And a French pilot during the First World War, flying by the light of a full moon on a reconnaissance mission near Vosges, saw a ghostly cloud of them, apparently hovering entirely still in the air: ‘As we came to about ten thousand feet … we suddenly found ...”

“... have magical curative properties; as late as 1789, a unicorn drinking horn was used to protect the French court, where it was said to sweat and change colour in the presence of poison. To prove the horn’s efficacy, Ivan ordered his physician to scratch a circle on the table with the tip of the horn, and to ‘seeke owt for som spiders’. The spiders placed ...”

“... puts it, the Pygmalion myth ‘is repeated within the story with the gender roles reversed ... Katherine acts as the creative Pygmalion rather than the created statue.’ Robin – the youthful ‘hero’ – ‘is her work of art, her “Jill Bradley and Willow Gables” fantasy. She is no longer merely the object of male creative fantasy; she has become ...”

“... ended in Elizabeth being cast off. The gossip at court was that ‘laquelle il avoit chassee de la maison pour lavoir deprehendee en adultere.’ The poetry Wyatt wrote at this time can be read as a personal and spittingly angry lament, although, as Susan Brigden points out in her magnificent biography, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest, he wrote in a ...”

“... nurses the illusion that he is one of the lost arms of the Venus de Milo, and hopes that the French government may be persuaded to buy him. On all other subjects I believe he is tolerably sane.’ To read a Saki story is to hire an assassin. There have been many attempts in the last hundred years to re-create that specific Saki feeling; the pleasures of ...”

“... he was said to have mastered Aramaic, Arabic and Persian as well as Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French and Italian.More familiar figures are seen in a new light. Richard Porson, a student and, briefly, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge before becoming the Regius Professor of Greek in 1792, was praised for his editions of Greek tragedies and his ...”

“... how she might have turned out. Nevertheless, a comparison between Mary and Elizabeth, daughters of Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn respectively, neatly demonstrates the strength of the maternal gene. If we turn to the Stuarts, the difficulty of finding a common denominator between them which is genuinely ‘Stuart’ is even more acute. For the House of ...”

“... someone, meet their mother – and so it was with the Tudor princesses. Mary, the daughter of Katherine of Aragon, was straightforward, pious, brave in a crisis, not especially bright. Her whole life was shaped by her mother’s straightforwardness and bravery in a crisis: when Henry VIII wanted Katherine to accept that ...”

“... Late Victorian critic who enthused over the structure of Wuthering Heights to the novelist L.P. Hartley, who doted on her whole oeuvre and personality. The magisterial Dr Leavis observed, before directing our attention to George Eliot, that there is ‘only one Brontë’ – meaning Emily – and even Mrs Leavis was awed by Wuthering Heights. The only ...”

“... Virginia Woolf​ wasn’t sure what she felt when she heard that Katherine Mansfield was dead. The cook, ‘in her sensational way’, had broken the news to her at breakfast: ‘Mrs Murry’s dead! It says so in the paper!’At that one feels – what? A shock of relief? – a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little – then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day ...”

“... was demonised by Catholics as the bad seed who had ruined everything, the bane of virtuous Queen Katherine, virtually the murderer of saintly Thomas More. For Protestants, she was, formally at least, the rootstock of their Reformation, and to be honoured as such. But mud sticks, and, after all, it was not the likes of Thomas More but the sacred monarch ...”

“... also of containing too much history.* In it Thomas Cromwell frees Henry VIII from his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, engineers his union with Anne Boleyn by breaking from Rome, and has Thomas More executed. At the end of the book, in the late summer of 1535, Cromwell, the king and his attendants stop off at Wolf Hall in Wiltshire, the home of the blandly ...”