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“... the odd squid: but in only one mammal, the golden mole. Some species are black, some metallic silver or tawny yellow, but under different lights and from different angles, their fur shifts through turquoise, navy, purple, gold. Moles, then, with a tendency towards sky colours. The golden mole is not, in fact, a mole. It’s more closely related to the ...”

“... they become: of the 32 species, some, such as the Burmese hare, are reddish-grey shading to silver; others, like the Tibetan Woolly, the colour of just-cut straw. The Indian Hare wears a patch of black at the back of its neck like a hair ribbon. The mountain hares in the north of Britain turn stark white in winter – real white, which only lasts a ...”

“... and then attempting to heal a cook who’d been condemned to death for stealing the king’s silver, on the understanding that if the man survived his life would be spared. The cook died gruesomely seven hours later. Scattered alongside incunabula and illuminated texts are images by Jim Kay, the artist behind the new illustrated Potter books, whose work ...”

“... or dynastic milestones. The person most likely to have commissioned them is the Howard matriarch Katherine Knyvett, second wife of Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Suffolk. Larkin painted Katherine wearing a red farthingale dress with gold embroidery and a ruff so large her head looks as if it were served up on a plate like John ...”

“... were ordered to wear appropriate clothes. Their wives should wear cheap shoes. No more silk or silver cloth. No more embroidery or enamelling. No more gold brooches, silver clasps, chains or bracelets. No more precious stones, belts or knives. No more baubles. England’s first sumptuary law is often cited as evidence ...”

“... from the Somme. It’s a world, like that of Oscar Wilde or P.G. Wodehouse, of silk curtains and silver tea sets, though Saki’s is populated not only with tyrannical aunts and obtuse majors, but also with tigers and woodland gods. In ‘Sredni Vashtar’, a boy worships a ferret as a god; the worship gives the ferret a power of its own, and it eats the ...”

“... Lord has delivered you into our hands.’ 2 ‘No personal God or any such nonsense’ – Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp to Murry, spouse, from Villa Isola Bella, Menton, 18 October – being much the age Blaise Pascal was (three centuries back) to whom God personally did appear that day ‘from about ten thirty p.m. till past midnight’. Sick ...”

“... Henry V (1599). The last of these demonstrates, furthermore, particularly in the scene of Princess Katherine’s English lesson, III.iv, that Shakespeare had a reasonable grasp of French. Just as important for the story Nicholl tells in The Lodger, it also demonstrates that Shakespeare had a reasonable grasp of the sorry position occupied by women in struggles ...”

“... for feminist and lesbian reworking. Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid, Elizabeth George, Mary Wings and Katherine Forrest have re-created the detective as a single or Sapphic thirty-something woman, brandishing a handgun. The shape-shifting and self-suppression which most women, and especially lesbian women, perform daily have become nifty accessories of crime ...”

“... of beautiful material. Apparently they were part of my grandmother’s two wedding-dresses. Katherine, who’d worked at the house for fifty years, had, by the time of my grandmother’s death, become her closest companion. (The colonel had died in 1955.) But even Katherine wasn’t certain which material belonged to ...”

“... did not care what toil he endured for their sakes.’ This was just as well, for he and his wife Katherine had no fewer than 12 children, though four of their daughters died tragically young in an epidemic which finally induced the family to forsake Arran. Their two younger sons deservedly get chapters to themselves in The Macmillans. Mr Daniel and Mr ...”

“... is not for delicate writing’, can occasionally irrupt with invincible common sense: ‘he puts Katherine Mansfield above Virginia Woolf, a “too well-educated woman writing her best” ’ – which at least provides food for thought; he thinks Galsworthy ‘a gentlemanly ass’; he asserts that copulation ‘has no connection with “passion” in the ...”

“... person, she says: ‘You spent the first half of your life rich, the second poor … Hence the Silver Spoon syndrome that has always marked you out: the indestructible sensation that the money will come from somewhere.’ The writer Mariana Enriquez has described Gainza as belonging to ‘the elite of the elite’, attributing the ‘ruined ...”

“... even in Aspen, his home town, Ross was regarded as an oddball. Born in 1892, the son of an Irish silver-miner, he left school as early as he could. His aim was to become a newsman – he had worked on the local paper during his school holidays and caught the bug. His parents disapproved but even so they seem to have prepared him well. His mother, a frontier ...”

“... room, and lengthy speculations about the relationship between James Clerk Maxwell and his wife, Katherine, with whom he occasionally collaborated.Sen​ insists that to make decisions about electric cars, wind farms and nuclear energy requires a grasp of the scientific fundamentals. But why should a familiarity with Carnot cycles, Maxwell’s demon or ...”