“... like Clare, obstinate linguistic feminists like Emily Dickinson, First World writers like Elizabeth Bishop with Third World imaginations, Eastern European activists and ‘wakers-up’ like Holub and Herbert, deconstructive poets of soccer-violence Britain like Peter Reading. Opposed to them are a number of predictable villains ...”

“... the point, for the novel’s life is over – would we go on being interested in a married Emma or Elizabeth Bennet? – but Anita Brookner performs the feat in a characteristically unnerving if elegant way. Her heroine Anna is still there on the page, in the last few pages, when she loses her point and joins all the rest of us in our all too real ...”

“... Not since Arnold Bennett, Elizabeth Bowen and Vicki Baum can a novelist have looked so readily for resonance in the name and function of hotels. After his world-beating Freudian serve with The White Hotel here is D.M. Thomas again, standing on the baseline at the start of his new novel in yet another hotel setting ...”

“... the period after the Second World War.’ She gives much of the credit for this shift in taste to Elizabeth David, who in the 1950s preached that the fruits of the earth were more than mere adjuncts to flesh. Now the high price of meat is doing Mrs David’s work for her. The campaign has been waged mostly by women, over the dead bodies (metaphorically and ...”

“... his wife’s salon as well. Unlike the reclusive Tulkinghorn in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, George and Elizabeth Lewis in Portland Place entertained a sparkling array of the period’s artists (Alma-Tadema, Whistler and Burne-Jones, with whom they were on especially intimate terms), writers (Barrie, Meredith, Hardy, Henry James), and theatrical people (Irving and ...”

“... agent for the King’s Secret, to act as a courier for a secret correspondence between the Empress Elizabeth of Russia and Louis XV. He proved a great success as a spy, and equally as a diplomat, winning golden opinions all round – so much so that the Empress wanted him to take a post at her court. By this time, however, he was pining to see action as a ...”

“... alchemist, book collector and egotist. Again like Tycho, he advised his sovereign, in his case Elizabeth I, on astrological matters, and also on such down-to-earth questions as whether to invest in voyages of exploration and how to provide timber for the British Navy; and he outlined a course of astronomical and astrological observations and calculations ...”

“... extensive notes on his visits to Picasso over the years, his letters to the artist, and Elizabeth Cowling’s invaluable explanations and interpretations of these writings. Without her comments, we would quite often lose the point and, just as often, the meaning of these scribblings and musings, which take us from the first moments of the ...”

“... never became a Catholic monk. Michel de Castelnau, the French ambassador, did not ‘trust’ that Elizabeth could be assassinated, and his secretary, Courcelles, did not become an English mole. (I confess that I said he did, but withdrew the charge in a second account which Honan cites.) Padua was not an independent city-state. The English College at Douai ...”

“... Henry wished for his daughter. After his marriage to Anne Boleyn and the birth of their daughter, Elizabeth, Mary was sent to join the household of the infant princess. There, she was surrounded by connections of the Boleyn queen. Margaret was superfluous; curtly, Henry wrote her off as a fool. If he had trusted her once, he no longer did so. The prestige of ...”

“... Singham) and African American studies (Harold Cruse). Robinson’s wife and intellectual partner, Elizabeth, began graduate studies in anthropology there, while Robinson joined the politics department, teaching on the new Black Studies programme, where the visiting speakers included Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney and James and Grace Lee ...”

“... saved England from becoming yet another component of the Habsburg Empire. Her half-sister, Elizabeth I, avoided the problem by avoiding matrimony altogether. Anne’s consort, the dim Prince George of Denmark, confined himself largely to trying (and failing) to provide a successor to the Stuart crown. It is the most cogent testimony to Prince ...”

“... enclosure, the plague, the poor law and the Essex Rebellion. The play concludes with the future Elizabeth I’s christening, during which her godfather, Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, is inspired to prophesy:In her days every man shall eat in safety,Under his own vine, what he plants; and singThe merry songs of peace to all his neighbours:God ...”

“... How​ does a comic writer describe a world that has stopped being funny? What to say when the system you satirise is swept away, when parts of the population are killed, when the survivors become refugees, drifting away en masse but it’s unclear where to? Teffi was faced with these questions as she tried to make sense of revolution in St Petersburg, as she fled through the Civil War, as she crossed the Black Sea along with other refugees to start a new life in a place which would in turn be engulfed by fascism and war ...”

“... turned inward and began to disintegrate. When the report was published I was outside the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in the shadow of Westminster Abbey, with family members of British soldiers killed or injured during the conflict. During the day the atmosphere swung between anxiety and expectation, celebration and anger. Chilcot’s statement given that ...”