“... 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 ...”

“... inroads in the Northern Cape and could even evict the ANC from its Eastern Cape stronghold of Port Elizabeth. The ANC’s corruption and maladministration have demoralised even its own activists, but the other main reason for its plight is the decisive movement towards the DA of both the country’s 1.3 million Indians and, especially, the mixed-race ...”

“... the filth of unavailability once and for all. Suspect device: the Blackberry. Before I became the Elizabeth Taylor of the telecommunications universe, I had loved being out of contact. I wandered round galleries and read books at the edge of lakes. I ruminated on trains. I slept all night. Then, one day, I realised something that other people had realised ...”

“... on the evidence of directions taken by several serious poets (Robert Lowell and Robert Bly, Elizabeth Bishop and Ed Dorn are those who come to mind) – that the North American imagination is beginning to define its identity no longer on a West-East axis, across the Atlantic to Europe, but North-South, across the Rio Grande and down to Buenos Aires. If ...”

“... up three wide steps covered in yellow linoleum. There, not knowing how to choose, I gravitated to Elizabeth Bowen – along with others, including Compton Mackenzie and Hugh Walpole, of whose writing I can’t now recall even the faintest flavour. I’d never heard of any of them – I’d not heard of anybody much – but I was reassured by bound sets of ...”

“... profession, later to become a circus equestrienne’); it can also be detected here and there in Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005). But it was still surprising that comedy was so prominent in the interrogatory toolkit he then took to using on opinionated figures closely modelled on himself. ‘My guess is he unbuttons himself when I am ...”

“... level, Mansfield’s was a model career and Samuel Smiles wrote of him with reverence. His wife, Elizabeth, to whom he was devotedly married for 46 years, was the daughter of an earl and the granddaughter of a lord chancellor. A dutiful but not excessively devout Anglican, he prospered at the bar, then entered Parliament and almost at once was appointed ...”

“... woman?’ (emphasis on the question mark). Then he shifts to the deck of the merchant ship Elizabeth, en route from Livorno to New York City in 1850, whose passengers included the 40-year-old Fuller, ‘in a white nightgown, your hair fallen long’, with her young Italian lover (to whom she may or may not have been married) and their one-year-old ...”