“... 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 ...”

“... reconciliation (among other things, he organised the handshake between Martin McGuinness and Queen Elizabeth in 2012), will lead the investigation team.These gestures don’t change the fact that families are being asked to give up a set of legal processes and put their trust in a new, untested system designed and imposed by one party to a multi-sided ...”

“... the Canadian border, twelve miles west of the state line’, where a high schooler could look like Elizabeth Taylor in saddle shoes and MacLachlan, as Special Agent Dale Cooper, had the same quality Kael detected in Cary Grant: ‘Being the pursued doesn’t make him weak or passively soft. It makes him glamorous.’ It was, really, an advert – for the ...”

“... Republic. The loan was secured by some jewels that may have belonged to the murdered Grand Duchess Elizabeth. When this matter resurfaced in the Dáil 25 years later it caused some embarrassment but the loan was quickly repaid and the jewels returned. (When, belatedly, Ireland reopened diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1974 I raised a wintry smile ...”

“... the Lady Arrogant – as enemies sometimes called her – took one look at the famous picture of Elizabeth Eckford, the lone Black girl on her way into school being yelled at by a line of hate-filled whites, and decided that the most important thing going on in it was what it said about negligent Black parents and ‘the equally absent representatives of the ...”

“... sketch out a simpler diet than we’re used to, an equivalent for rainy, hectic Britain of what Elizabeth David discerned in the Mediterranean diet when she called it ‘the rational, right and proper food for human beings to eat’. Except there’s no romantic sense, as there was in David, of a benign landscape supporting people who understand its ...”

“... the National Book Award for Fiction, which struck some as a sympathy vote at the time, much like Elizabeth Taylor’s best actress Oscar for Butterfield 8. The Big One eluded her. In 2003, J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize, which depressed Sontag, Moser writes, since ‘it made it highly unlikely that another English-language writer would receive it in the ...”

“... sets, finessed by fashionable architects, are like parodies of facilities promised for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. And nobody but the owners can get at them. What could be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours ...”

“... is a fighter. He’s a gentleman. He likes a beer.’ In​ her 1938 novel The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen describes a train trip from London to the Kent seaside. It’s one of the most extraordinary journeys in English literature. Without stretching the bounds of the real, she takes her young protagonist, Portia, from a 19th-century milieu – a ...”

“... a recalibrating of history: as a hospital or asylum vanishes, we thirst for stories of Queen Elizabeth I at Tilbury or Pocahontas coming ashore, in her dying fever, at Gravesend. The documented records of the lives of those unfortunates shipped out to cholera hospitals on Dartford Marshes, or secure madhouses in the slipstream of the M25, can be dumped ...”

“... the ceremonial life of the late medieval church and its systematic dismantling under Edward VI and Elizabeth. I hadn’t realised that the Elizabethan Settlement also meant the end of the mystery plays, which were pretty well forgotten by 1580. It shames me that I am more outraged by these events of nearly five hundred years ago (particularly by the ...”

“... in the Arctic. Work consulted in the writing of this piece: Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert (Bloomsbury, 210 pp., £14.99, June 2006, 978 0 7475 8383 7) Dictionary of Environment and Conservation by Chris Park (Oxford, 522 pp., £19.99, November 2006, 978 0 19 860995 7) After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination by Kirkpatrick Sale ...”

“... so her father reasoned, why burden her with the effete and fancy prolongation of ‘Elizabeth’? A miser in everything, he even cropped off half her name before he gave it to her. So ‘Lizzie’ it was, stark and unadorned, and she is a motherless child, orphaned at two years old, poor thing. Now she is two-and-thirty and yet the memory of ...”

“... as a revelation by some of the leading figures in the field – David Treuer, Claudio Saunt, Elizabeth Fenn, Elliott West – and its depiction of a pumped-up period of Indigenous control has achieved far greater commercial success than the milder revisionism in favour of Native agency of Kathleen DuVal’s The Native Ground (2006) and Michael Witgen’s ...”