“... him a quiver. He liked parades with floats full of Miss Americas and Miss Daytona Beaches and Miss Queen Cotton Products. He didn’t have any use for processions and a procession full of schoolteachers was about as deadly as the River Styx to his way of thinking. However, he was willing to sit on the stage in his uniform so ...”

“... pay homage to the Virgin, Elizabeth Cameron translated into the vital and all-forgiving gothic mother-goddess. News of engagements, marriages and accouchements filled his letters. He even dreamed he was going to have a baby, an amusing revelation, he wrote to Mrs Cameron, ‘of my own mind and character’, and came to depend on his ‘coop’ of ...”

“... Famous Impostors (1910) included chapters on royal pretenders, pages of wild speculation that Queen Elizabeth I was in fact a boy from the town of Bisley, and a chapter on women who masqueraded as men, including a subset whom Stoker deemed the most implausible impostors of all: women who masqueraded as military men. The ...”

“... over the fireplace are far from being the daubs I thought they were but reputedly come from Queen Elizabeth I’s state barge and may even have accompanied Drake round the world on the Golden Hind.22 February. Jocelyn Herbert’s 80th birthday party at the Royal College of Art, the Senior Common Room packed with ...”

“... dedicating a book on the events of 1399 to her rebellious former favourite, the Earl of Essex. The queen found it seditious even to broach the topic of a past tyrannicide; Essex’s supporters planned to use a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II as a signal for his uprising to begin. After having Essex ...”

“... four years ago, but many of the pictures were taken in the 1970s – not an easy time to be a drag queen in Boston. To Goldin her friends were ‘stars’ – and that’s how she photographed them.The advantage of a slideshow over a film, Goldin has said, is that a slideshow can be ‘constantly re-edited’, as these were ...”

“... Assia would afterwards meet clandestinely in London, until an argument during a visit by Plath’s mother, Aurelia, caused Hughes to leave Plath. In the late summer, Hughes writes to Olwyn that ‘things are quite irrevocable,’ and recounts a dream – a frequent subject in his letters – in which ‘Hitler came to me, furious, demanding that I carry out ...”

“... that we might shortly be privileged to see her (just before her canonisation along with her pal, Mother Teresa) with an entirely shaved head. I await the moment with quiet excitement. Tempered steel is emerging from the nondescript little girl whose marital suffering has made a woman of her. Once praised merely for ‘being, not for doing’, she has decided ...”

“... of pages of notes on Hume, Montesquieu and Blackstone. From his beloved tutor Lord Bute and his mother, Augusta, who founded the Royal Botanic Gardens, he derived a love of botany – Kew was for years his favourite residence and strolling ground. He played the harpsichord, piano, flute and organ, sometimes accompanied on the keyboard by J.C. Bach. Frugal ...”

“... Consider, Herr Doktor, some of the diagnostic highlights: 1. The Family Romance. Shady Prostitute-Mother and Unknown Father. Precocious Sexual Enlightenment. Bernhardt’s mother, an elegant and pragmatic Dutch courtesan called Youle van Hard, trained her daughter from infancy for the life of a grande horizontale. Which is ...”

“... Yet Castle rests in public memory (if at all) as a class warrior, the abrasive, too stylish Red Queen, while the personable, sartorially challenged Williams is thought of as reasonable, classless and comfortably middle of the road. This, again, isn’t quite right. Williams isn’t a liberal or a centrist but a social ...”

“... Southerners who divorced during his childhood, which was divided between Tennessee and California, mother and grandparents. (Pritchard very effectively relates the return of letters written by him to his mother in this period with the writing of the last poems.) From the time he went at the age of 18 to Vanderbilt and ...”

“... a hereditary disorder aggravated by a troubled childhood – as the unwanted son of a domineering mother caught in an unwanted marriage to a weak husband. The book is compassionate and sardonic in tracing the rises and falls, the grimness and the painful comedies, of Lowell’s career. Lowell saw the joke himself, and was helped by seeing it: Hamilton sees ...”

“... the destructive maternity of nature in Stevens’s ‘Madame La Fleurie’: His grief is that his mother should feed on him, himself and what he saw, In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light. Glück’s poem too arrives at a commanding impersonality. Looking ...”

“... There were his endless illusions about people: it is typical that when he was trying to save his mother’s life he employed two agents who had sold out to the English, and that when he was trying to ensure his succession to the English throne he chose Essex as his ally. There was his constant illusion that an alliance with Spain would be possible and ...”