“... the Strand had become a magnet to the discontented, he believed that the rivals who now commanded Elizabeth’s favour were bent not only on manipulating the Queen to their advantage and the nation’s disadvantage, but on his own destruction. Only a pre-emptive strike, he concluded, could save him. On Sunday, 8 February, he set out to raise the city of ...”

“... the offing, in the shape of Doris Kilman, history teacher and constant companion to her daughter, Elizabeth. Elizabeth, it seems, doesn’t care for anything very much apart from her dog, Grizzle. The whole house stinks of the tar used to treat the animal’s distemper. ‘Still, better poor Grizzle,’ Clarissa ...”

“... Jones go unmentioned, and James’s only reference to vernacular verse is apparently his letter to Elizabeth, where he sends her, with all the hurt feelings of a snubbed author, a second copy of a sonnet, with the remarks: ‘Madame, I did send you before some verse ... and the bearer thereof returned and yet void of answer.’ It is not, to be sure, a very ...”

“... 1960s O’Brian told Tolstoy that ‘he had been quite a “bull” in his youth.’ He married Elizabeth Jones, a seamstress from North Wales, in February 1936. Richard, their son, was born a year later, followed two years after that by a daughter, Jane.Their marriage wasn’t a success. Patrick turned out to have a deep loathing of children which Tolstoy ...”

“... he knows it. Born in London in 1572, a year after a doomed international conspiracy to replace Elizabeth I with her papist cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, Donne was, as Katherine Rundell puts it in her new biography, ‘not just Catholic … but super-Catholic’, the scion of a double line of renowned religious recusants. His father’s family estates were ...”

“... in Egypt just when King Tut’s tomb is opened, gets photographed by Man Ray, has sherry with Elizabeth Bowen, runs into Arthur Waley at Iseult Gonne’s, becomes Freud’s analysand in 1933, reads her poetry before the future Queen Elizabeth II during the Second World War. One wonders why there has been no biopic, or ...”

“... and Scott Fitzgerald. This may be all to the good, though it leads him to such remarks as that Elizabeth Bennet’s ‘gay resilience in a society tending always towards dull conformity would make her a worthy heroine in a Stendhal novel, which cannot be said for many English heroines’. Perhaps it cannot at the moment, but no doubt it will be soon: to ...”

“... gothic. Born Nathaniel Hathorne, the only son of a ship’s captain also called Nathaniel, and of Elizabeth Manning Hathorne, who had been two months pregnant with their first child when the couple married, the future novelist eventually distanced himself from his origins, Herbert suggests, when he changed the spelling of the family name to ‘Hawthorne’ as ...”

“... the institution itself. In her view, three writers only – Amber Reeves, Olivia Shakespear and Elizabeth von Arnim – did that. I can’t quite share her enthusiasm for Reeves and Shakespear, but I think she is absolutely right to describe von Arnim’s The Pastor’s Wife (1914) as the ‘most remarkable’ of the Edwardian ‘marriage ...”

“... the man and the nature of his faith is his weeping for joy on hearing the prophecy of Elizabeth Barton, the nun of Kent, that if Henry were to marry Anne, he would not remain king for long. Once Fisher and More and a handful of public opponents had been crushed, Henry proceded to dissolve the monasteries, and to attack abuses relating to the ...”

“... of novelists, Jane Austen. In Pride and Prejudice, when Lady Catherine de Bourgh tries to warn Elizabeth Bennet off marrying Mr Darcy, Elizabeth replies: ‘He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter; so far we are equal.’ Lady Catherine does not answer, ‘But he is an aristocrat and you are at the bottom end of ...”

“... they are by birth. They cannot even, as contemporaries sometimes urged, drop part of the claim. Elizabeth of England tried to make Mary give up her claim to the English throne – understandably, since it was a better one than her own – and many of Charles Edward’s Scottish supporters urged him to settle for Scotland only. But a dynasty’s claims, if ...”

“... in the content of the painting is another matter. Lightbown is convinced that the prominence of St Elizabeth and the infant Baptist beside the throne of the Virgin and opposite the kneeling Marquess is connected with the fact that they are associated with baptism, ‘the rite that above all others separates Christians from Jews’, and he notes that they ...”

“... who wakes just in time, which the fiction and verse of Sidney and Spenser had used to urge Queen Elizabeth to mend her ways. What the editors of The Crisis of 1614 have enterprisingly done for that year could have been attempted for a number of other occasions in early modern English history. Whether or not we call them ‘crises’, moments of heightened ...”

“... overheated version of Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), Clift lets the women take centre-stage; it’s Elizabeth Taylor’s film, then Katharine Hepburn’s. Here, as in Freud, he’s a ‘listener’. Of all the early films, it’s in the last, Vittorio De Sica’s excellent (though butchered) Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953) that Clift takes the greatest ...”