“... the Calvinist international was often a matter of words or gestures, which cost rulers nothing. Elizabeth I, in spite of ‘la mauvaise opinion’ which she held of Geneva after John Knox had written his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women there, found it convenient to mouth pious concern for her distressed co-religionists ...”

“... growing more African. He told stories of his ancestors – who came back to the Gold Coast from North America – freed slaves – including his grandfather, a prosperous trader, called Buck Savage . . . They were very English indeed these immigrant Creoles . . . went on the grand tour – bought Victorian plush furniture and so forth. In Cameroun he ...”

“... his most bitingly satirical and contemptuous poems about the bourgeoisie being read by stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Eve-Marie Saint, to whoops of delight from a well-to-do, enlightened middle-class audience. He was (to put it moderately) unenthusiastic about academics: yet here were numbers of professors competing for what one can only call ‘bits’ of ...”

“... in Germany to ease her family’s financial situation. She later taught at a girls’ school in North London and worked as a governess. But after her father was declared bankrupt in 1893, and her mother committed suicide in 1895, Richardson decided to make a fresh start by moving to London and living on her own. She rented an attic room on the edge of ...”

“... might easily have been avoided. For example, when the young Mansfield, touring remote parts of the North Island, buys ‘a Maori kit’, Tomalin explains that this is ‘a version of traditional Maori costume’. But a Maori kit is a basket of woven flax (the Maori word is kete). Later we have Mansfield wearing her ‘kit’ in London. It is easy to defend ...”

“... Woolf considered her musings about the war to be a ‘whiff of shot in the cause of freedom’. Elizabeth Bowen was even more grandiloquent: ‘Wartime writing is in a sense resistance writing.’ But in fact their subject and the attitude they were required to adopt forced them along paths which were not familiar to them, and often not ...”

“... doesn’t shine’ is pure ‘Carry on up the Corner Flag’. Later, Kuper interviews the Preston North End winger Tom Finney about the Cup Final of 1941, when Preston beat Arsenal. Wasn’t it odd, he asks, to play the final in bombed-out London? ‘I wasn’t all that interested in the war when I was playing,’ Finney answers. ‘I was only 18. And the ...”

“... tied to time and place to feel unreal. She writes of ‘the astonishing beauty of the industrial north’, the ‘blue-grey landscapes’ of ‘rolling hills, the mingling of smoke and cloud, the white steam from the dye-houses, the cobbled streets and houses of blackened stone’, or of a ‘grey-green marsh, sickly with meadow-sweet’. She knows this ...”

“... newspapers, August 2011: Natasha Reid, 24, pleaded guilty to stealing a television from a Comet in North London during the riots of 7 August. Her mother said she was ‘baffled’ by her own behaviour – she had a much nicer TV set at home. Shonola Smith, 22, pleaded guilty, along with her sister and a friend, to ‘entering’ Argos in Croydon: ‘The ...”

“... windy still almost warm. Between Rupert getting up and him fetching me a cup of tea I reread ‘Elizabeth at Rycote’, an essay in A.L. Rowse’s The English Spirit, published in 1944 and bought, I see from the flyleaf, when I was in Cork in 1963. Rowse figures in it, having walked out from Oxford to Rycote with Bruce McFarlane during the war. Rowse here ...”

“... The only Democratic leaders who are known to many Americans are Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and their combined age is 220. How did that happen? The Clinton-Obama dollar tree cast a shade for a quarter-century in which smaller political fortunes have struggled even to breathe. Meanwhile, the Democrats remain in denial about the charm of ...”

“... treated as freakish androgynes, like Maesia who defended herself in the Forum. The obvious case is Elizabeth I’s belligerent address to the troops at Tilbury in 1588 in the face of the Spanish Armada.10 In the words many of us learned at school, she seems positively to avow her own androgyny: ‘I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the ...”

“... we never know. But his next step was to enter into a contract of marriage with his ward, Elizabeth Lady Lisle, whose title he had taken. Elizabeth was only eight but she was an heiress and the move took her off the market till she grew up, giving Charles the use of her resources. As long as the marriage was ...”

“... what James conveys himself. As you might expect, Browning loves ‘and’. Here he is writing to Elizabeth Barrett about the splendours of the Dulwich Picture Gallery: ‘those two Guidos, the wonderful Rembrandt of Jacob’s vision, such a Watteau, the triumphant three Murillo pictures, a Giorgione music-lesson group, all the Poussins with the ...”

“... of friends’ bands whose gigs I used occasionally to go to in the basements and back rooms of North London pubs was an indie guitar group called Keane. One Friday night in the early summer of 2001 at the Monarch on Chalk Farm Road, my girlfriend gave their manager (an ex-boyfriend of hers) a couple of quid for a homemade CD. ‘That’ll be worth a lot of ...”