spit and image

With his patrician nose and sunken eyes — to many, the spit and image of Juan Carlos himself — Mr. Solà said his own face was the easiest evidence of his parentage.

“He was full of smiles, and his smile just lit up a room. His brother was just a spit and image of him,” Ms. Redd said.

He looked up at me and said, “By Gawd! If you ain’t the spit and image of your pa. Same pale skin, same sandy-brown hair, and same puke-green eyes. They tolt me you was huge but I didn’t have no idea. How old is you?”

He was, inevitably, the apple of their eye, a fact that, in operation, caused Deborah to frown, and sometimes, reluctantly, to smile; and, as they said, if there was any white blood in him, it didn’t show—he was the spit and image of his mother.

But the hub connecting the various spokes of Sunday’s episode, titled “The Queen’s Justice,” was the queen herself, who, we were reminded by Mycroft the Iron Banker, was the spit and image of her father even as everyone else was trying to distance themselves from the sins of their ancestors.