“... prescriptive stuff. Berger’s bleat drew a warm seconding letter from the reliably reactionary Elizabeth Jane Howard and her friend Sybille Bedford. If Berger had slyly blamed all the mayhem onto ‘the Rushdie affair’, these two went him one better in the business of culpability. The violence was not the result of some artfully displaced ...”

“... mass of richest spices, putrified into a dunghill’), and advised Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett and Alfred Tennyson to give up poetry and write prose instead. Not only his contemporaries fell short. Milton was guilty of unsystematic reasoning (‘It is quite clear that he never studied mathematics very deeply, or political economy – or ...”

“... windows. What bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal Theatre was giving a premiere, a ...”

“... was forthcoming. The first biographical works about Cather were personal remembrances by Lewis and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, both from 1953. The first critical biography, by E.K. Brown, appeared the same year. A proscription in Cather’s will against quoting from or publishing her letters had disastrous consequences: scholars were forced to ...”

“... he is saved, as Frederick had been saved by the sudden death of his arch-enemy the Empress Elizabeth of Russia. This clutch of a precedent shows an almost pathetic stupidity – and the paranoiac’s ignorance of and separation from the realities of the outside world. Yet Hitler had once been truly a part of that world, and of the German and European ...”

“... interesting connection comes via the marriage, in the early 1570s, of his older brother William to Elizabeth Stafford. She was the sister of Sir Edward Stafford, who later became English Ambassador in France. Here is a hitherto unknown dimension to Thomas Drury: he is a brother-in-law of that most conspiratorial of ambassadors, whose house in Paris was a ...”

“... and ugly dog-ears stuck on at either end – a foretaste of the disaster inside. By the time Queen Elizabeth inaugurated the Opera House on 20 October 1973, the final cost was A$102 million (then £51 million) of which 75 per cent was spent after Utzon’s departure, often exceeding the lottery income. George Molnar, a lecturer in architecture and a Sydney ...”

“... who has had plenty of time to think, but it can be indolent to the point of nervelessness. Thus of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet, he remarks: So far as I can see on an exceedingly cloudy day, I wouldn’t say she is particularly gifted as an actress. She seems, rather, to turn things off and on, much as she is told, with perhaps a fair amount of natural ...”

“... are described as having been wiped out, but then they reappear, only to be wiped out again.Queen Elizabeth managed to suppress the humiliating failure of Drake’s Counter-Armada to Coruña and Lisbon in 1589 so brilliantly that for three centuries no Englishman was aware of it – though English losses were far worse than Spanish losses had been the year ...”

“... of the price) is that it was made by Proust’s tailor. 18 April. A pre-operation session at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson wing of UCH down Huntley Street, in which Siobhan, a nice, cheerful and silly nurse, takes me through the same questionnaire I answered twice last week. She then takes me in to see the anaesthetist, and he goes through the same ...”

“... the knighthood in the personal gift of the monarch.When, in November 1947, the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip of Greece brought an array of royalties to London, Channon gave a dinner party at which the ten guests included the queens of Spain and Romania, even if neither then reigned in her country. ‘People gasped at the splendour which one rarely ...”

“... biography. Zirker’s volume includes seven works, one of which, ‘A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning’ (1753), concerns the well-known case which provided the basis for Josephine Tey’s novel The Franchise Affair. The Covent-Garden Journal (1752) is the last of Fielding’s major works of journalism, and perhaps the most interesting to ...”

“... burden on common definitions. But even here acute problems arise. The England of Edward I and of Elizabeth I was one country: but was it really the same kind of society, within the terms of the taxonomy itself, when villeinage had disappeared between the two? Sung China was a contemporary of Norman Sicily, and Runciman judges them absolutist alike. But where ...”

“... the BBC for nearly forty years and can still be heard in the archives introducing young Princess Elizabeth as she delivers her wartime address to the children of Britain. ‘Goodnight children, everywhere,’ was Uncle Mac’s catchprase. Though Gamlin’s activities were under wraps until now, there have long been rumours about McCulloch. He was given the ...”

“... prejudice?), and then ‘the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil’, an image and a phrase Elizabeth Bishop might not have disdained, with its quiet metaphorical swell. The rhythms and play of sounds, the subtle presence of things remembered in things seen, convey a genius for observation that one doesn’t think of as Forsterian. The Bishop-like ...”