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“... but they weren’t always objects of derision and fear. The patron saint of hairy ladies was Mary Magdalene, whose legend had by this time accrued much new detail, including an episode of penitent cave-dwelling during which her already prodigious head of hair grew to cover her whole body. Women who wanted to be rid of their husbands prayed to St ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”