“... whether in his duelling, in the hectoring tone of a few of his letters both to his wife and to Elizabeth Barry, or in the domineering machismo of poems like “The Advice” or “Phyllis, be gentler, I advise”, and his sexual satires’. ‘Machismo’ is the appropriately damning word. Treglown warns against ‘a modern tendency to generalise ...”

“... other way of going on. They are on the fringe of the professional class; the two women Lesje and Elizabeth work in a museum and the man Nate (if man he is to be called) was once a lawyer and gave it up to be a toymaker. Elizabeth has sunk into apathy since the death of her most recent lover. Nate her husband compensates by ...”

“... novel in the US years before the Penguin school of cookery writers found its greatest star in Elizabeth David in the late Fifties and early Sixties. For these writers, and for Patience Gray, cookery is what the open road was to Cobbett or the natural history of Selbourne to Gilbert White. There is, however, a difference: these are women to whom food is ...”

“... In all our sets of mental pigeonholes there is one labelled ‘don’t bother’. It contains groups of people and of ideas to which we have decided not to pay attention. These books, in one way or another, relate to such groups. Women are an obvious case. Yet, except in societies which kill off female babies or starve small girls, they cannot be dismissed as a minority ...”

“... winds and towering seas that scattered the fleet, driving them far to the south. The Hind and the Elizabeth reached the western end of the Strait again nearly a month later, but the next day the Elizabeth was driven back into it. She eventually sailed for home and the Hind carried on alone, on an uninterrupted and ...”

“... Blackwood comes across a newspaper photograph of the jumped-up lawyer standing next to Queen Elizabeth at a public function. She can hardly contain her outrage and repulsion. ‘Maître Blum must have tenaciously elbowed through hundreds of guests at the soirée in order to get as close to the Queen of England as she had managed. She had got herself so ...”

“... on her first voyage. In 1940, stealthily, in time for trooping duties, there arrived the Queen Elizabeth (the name which, many thought, should have gone to the Queen Mary). If Winston Churchill was right, the two Queens, by virtue of their speed and ability to carry 15,000 men each, shortened the war by about a year. That much admired high prow of the ...”

“... Thames; his likeness to God on earth; the fusing of the white rose and the red in his marriage to Elizabeth of York; its progeny; and its progeny’s progeny which must soon follow, securing the dynasty in perpetuity. But as London thrilled to the rich displays of chivalry, roses, pomegranates, castles, senators and dragons, the king was watching the nobles ...”

“... An Indian career meant that sons hardly saw their fathers once they were no longer infants. As Elizabeth Buettner observes in Empire Families, Sir Adelbert Talbot, the Resident in Kashmir, retired in the same month that his son Addy came out to start his own career in the ICS. Henry Cotton’s grandfather served in Madras from 1801 to 1830, retiring the ...”

“... it as ‘suffrage work – or women’s work – in another form’ in a letter to her mother, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the medical pioneer of the mid-Victorian women’s movement.With Murray, a Scottish-born anaesthetist, Anderson established the Women’s Hospital Corps, a mobile medical unit that could be deployed swiftly to northern France, but ...”

“... was a precursor of the Protestantism that would be institutionalised by her daughter, Elizabeth I. She was therefore seen as a key figure in promoting the Protestant Reformation. There is no evidence, however, that she was anything other than orthodox in her doctrinal views or religious practice. She attended Mass, gave alms and – to Henry’s ...”

“... centres. Portsmouth Harbour was full of Royal Navy ships, including the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth. From one angle, the Daring-class air defence destroyers looked like bull terriers; from another, like cans of stockpiled spam. The far right likes to talk about immigration in terms of invasion – a wave of such rhetoric carried Matteo Salvini all the ...”

“... constructivist patterns, the Dior suit worn by Marlene Dietrich arriving in New York on the Queen Elizabeth and a pile of suitcases discreetly labelled ‘The Duke of Windsor’. The more surprising items include an Art Deco Torah ark from the Queen Mary, looking like a sideboard in the throes of a spiritual crisis, and the blue and gold Madonna of the ...”

“... The Firm (HarperCollins, £6.99) was being read by every second person on the Tube last week. ‘Elizabeth II has been a very remarkable sovereign,’ she writes. ‘She has not put a foot wrong in more than fifty years and, while she may not be the most exciting of figures or the most inspirational of speakers, she is utterly genuine, totally dedicated and ...”

“... David Starkey – to take an almost random example – is talking about his bestselling Life of Elizabeth I not only at the Rye Festival this month (his session’s already sold out, I’m afraid), but at the Ilkley Literature Festival on 7 October, the Cheltenham Literature Festival on 21 October, the Southwark Festival on 31 October and probably at ...”