“... by their own laws. Traders had operated from Genoa, Venice and even England before this, but after Elizabeth I was declared a heretic in 1570, the English saw their contacts with the Ottomans not only as a way of circumventing European control of the passage of luxury items from the east but as a means of challenging the Catholic countries’ presence in the ...”

“... behind. But the novels also belong to an important tradition of English writers, mostly women – Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor and Rumer Godden and Penelope Fitzgerald among them – whose subject is the old world of class and empire, and the systems of education and intricate cultural codes that supported ...”

“... service to the horrors of slavery itself. In the 1970s Genovese started to write with his wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. A prolific scholar in her own right, she is best known for Within the Plantation Household, a study of women in the antebellum South, published in 1988. Though she died in 2007, she and her husband are listed as co-authors of Slavery in ...”

“... to supply anatomy teachers with corpses for dissection. In Dying for Victorian Medicine, Elizabeth Hurren uncovers a sordid trade that commoditised human remains. At the consumer end of the market were the medical schools, avid for dissection material following increases in 1858 and 1885 to the part played by anatomy in the medical syllabus. At the ...”

“... storytellers like Robert Stone and Joyce Carol Oates. He got mugged by realism. He realised that Elizabeth Bowen is just as good as Virginia Woolf but without the ‘affected prose style’, and that the selling of high art is ‘just one more form of commercialism’. The break came when he was assigned to review a collection by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The ...”

“... she knew how to please the paymaster. Poems such as ‘The Bas Bleu’ eulogised the bluestockings Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Carter who had made her welcome (the wealthy Montagu was one of her patrons); and when she started lecturing ‘the great’ on their propensity for drinking, gambling and having their hair done ...”

“... they let London invade them. Excursionists arriving at the chalk quarry, to the east of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge at Dartford, just off Watling Street, find themselves in a sort of processing plant or customs post for asylum seekers. A channel port (on go-slow). Bluewater skulks in the desert like the Tunisian set for a Star Wars sequel. Humans, having ...”

“... bishops eventually dispersed or rendered powerless. But Edward died young and when his half-sister Elizabeth brought back Protestantism in 1558-59, she was not inclined to go even as far as Edward in forcing change. So the Church of England, more by luck than judgment, preserved far more of the old life of secular and monastic cathedrals than any other ...”

“... and he may well devise other ways of dealing with the problematics of fiction. In his novel Elizabeth Costello he uses the figure of a distinguished Australian novelist, a rather weary 60-year-old, who travels the world picking up prizes and giving lectures on many subjects of interest to Coetzee: ‘The Lives of Animals’, ‘The Humanities in ...”

“... did); William Carlos Williams’s Rutherford home (where the famous icebox was, they point out); Elizabeth Bishop’s last residence on Boston Harbor; the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, which reassembled Marianne Moore’s Brooklyn living space on its own third floor. I’m pretty sure I can tell which poets the authors are really keen on ...”

“... new lessons from ancient hunters and herdsmen. Following domestication, write James Serpell and Elizabeth Paul, religious and secular ideologies reinforced ‘hierarchical notions of human separateness and superiority’, and the idea of animals as somehow equal with humans gave way to the world described in the Book of Genesis. Evolutionists and ...”

“... an uncommon name, and the playwright’s direct line died out in 1670 with his granddaughter Lady Elizabeth Barnard). The picture came into the family soon after the First World War, kindly provided by someone who couldn’t bear the idea that a modern-day William Shakespeare – whom she met, moreover, in her adopted home county of Warwickshire ...”

“... a luxury retirement village in the Kent countryside. Every Thursday they meet to solve cold cases. Elizabeth (who will be played by Helen Mirren in the forthcoming movie) is a retired MI6 agent, Joyce (Celia Imrie) a former nurse, Ron (Pierce Brosnan) a one-time union organiser and Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley) an ex-psychiatrist. Their former careers give them a ...”

“... title, like the Most Serene Republic of San Marino. Its head of state is your very own Queen Elizabeth II (though she exercises authority on Jersey as the Duke of Normandy). The local currency is the Jersey pound, convertible on a one-to-one basis with its mainland namesake. In fact, there’s nothing much that would make you sit up and take notice of ...”

“... knew to their cost. The Society of 1707 was not the first. Another society was founded under Elizabeth I. But her successor, James I, ‘took a little Mislike’ to it and it fizzled out. Charles I made the antiquary Robert Cotton close his famous library, thinking it seditious. Suspected at various times of anti-Stuart sympathies, closet ...”