Remarkable women

Stories of wit, courage, and defiance across three centuries

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Perspective Media
June 07, 2026

HISTORICAL PORTRAIT
Nell Gwynn
BY BORIS STARLING

Nell Gwyn: detail from an oil painting from the studio of Sir Peter Lely. National Portrait Gallery, London

Nell Gwyn rose from the most desperate of beginnings to become the most beloved royal mistress in British history—the only one the public ever truly took to its heart. Boris Starling traces how a girl from the gutter conquered Restoration London through sheer wit and charm, and asks why her name endures when so many others have been forgotten.

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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was one of the most brilliant women of the eighteenth century: a pioneering traveller, writer, and unlikely medical revolutionary. Katie Hickman traces how her encounters in the Ottoman Empire led her to a discovery that would save countless lives, and the brutal price she paid for daring to be right.

Perspective Media • Katie Hickman

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It was unthinkable that an experiment practised only by a few ignorant women amongst an illiterate and unthinking people should be inflicted on one of the politest nations in the world

Muriel Spark

Nicholas Lezard explores why Muriel Spark – arch, Catholic, Scottish, and wickedly funny –remains one of literature's most penetrating observers of the female mind. Behind the arched eyebrow and the devastating one-liner lies a novelist whose seemingly light touch conceals something altogether more serious.

Perspective Media • Nicholas Lezard

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Few other writers have, for me as an “insubstantial” man, offered such insights into the female sex

NICHOLAS LEZARD

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