“... fearful realisation that your children have minds of their own. The Bird’s Nest (1954) is about Elizabeth Richmond, who is being treated for multiple personality disorder. The novel, which is based on a case study from 1906, shares an interest in psychoanalysis with Hangsaman, and has similar weaknesses – too much spelling out, principally. ...”

“... Sloane’s Milk Chocolate’ through Soho shops. He also married a very wealthy planter’s widow, Elizabeth Rose, who brought him at least £4000 a year from the sugar plantations, a business which he kept up throughout the early 1700s. ‘One had to be back in England to make money out of the colonics,’ Braudel confirms. While Sloane’s average income ...”

“... is a Joycean ‘collideorscope’ of ‘conglomewriting’. If you’re sceptical about Beckett or Elizabeth Bowen’s familiarity with the Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis or Gerard Murphy’s Early Irish Lyrics, Muldoon argues that there’s no distinction between one text and the next when the féth fíada or ‘magic mist’ comes down. This gives him a free ...”

“... most dons are assumed to be active agents of the KGB; the only fact known about Oxford is the ‘King and Country’ debate of 1933, the only fact known about Cambridge is that it produced large numbers of homosexual spies. In a different context the populism could as easily come from the Left, where there is, after all, plenty of anti-intellectual animus ...”

“... to be met in London were likely to be exceptional in some way, like the unfortunate Lopez, Queen Elizabeth’s physician, who suffered the fate intended for Stalin’s doctors. Few members of Shakespeare’s audience can ever have met a Jew. In the popular imagination and on the stage, they were bloodyminded usurers with an inveterate hatred of ...”

“... other mine in the world: the Taylor-Burton Diamond, blinking out at Princess Grace of Monaco from Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage; the Golden Jubilee, described as a topaz in Thai state media so as not to burden the country with the knowledge that the king was buying diamonds the size of ping-pong balls during a financial ...”

“... form, and several transform it into a vehicle for poetic liberty. At the more extreme end is Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sonnet’, which, with 14 half-rhymed or unrhymed lines of six syllables or fewer, looks like the left-hand half of a sonnet cracked down the middle. It begins ‘Caught – the bubble/in the spirit level’ and goes on ‘Freed – the ...”

“... fiery birds and flowers. Experts entered the picture, such as the Dutchmen hired by Henry VIII; Elizabeth I, who had a soft spot for fireworks, created the position of ‘Fire Master of England’. A massive display at Warwick Castle in 1572 resulted in several houses being burned down (the queen raised a £25 compensation fund from her loyal subjects), and ...”

“... as anything else, she married Edwin Rollins, a white, gay legal aid lawyer; they had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan.In January 1964 Negro Digest published ‘Suffer the Children’, inspired by the racist bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama the previous year, which had killed four girls. It was an elegy rather than a ...”

“... first volume of the Ohio University Press Browning, under the general editorship of Roma King Jr; the most recent volume brings the reader from ‘A Soul’s Tragedy’ to the first volume of Men and Women. This fifth volume incorporates some changes in editorial policy and personnel which reflect the rough reception the Ohio Browning has ...”

“... in Ireland as everywhere else, and not just in the Ascendancy circles in which Beckett grew up. Elizabeth Bowen records that when her house was temporarily taken over in 1922 by the young soldiers of the IRA they avidly seized from the shelves the thin scarlet Kipling volumes and seemed to find themselves and their aspirations given substance and colour in ...”

“... a conventional education, at Gakushuin, Japan’s grandest school; among his English tutors was Elizabeth Vining, an American Quaker, who nicknamed him ‘Jimmy’. ‘His interests in those days were almost entirely confined to fish,’ she wrote later, ‘and I felt they needed broadening.’ The influence of this American pacifist on the young prince was ...”

“... trifle.Stamps. Donald started a new album, ‘EGYPT’. On the first page, a collage of stamps of King Farouk, who, like Michael of Romania, was a boy at his accession. The stamps are the first issue of his reign, designed in 1937. Later in the album we find the revised design of 1944, by which time Farouk was 24 and wearing a manly moustache on his rather ...”

“... that they would in due course graduate and enter the medical profession, into which so far only Elizabeth Blackwell (who had qualified in America) and Elizabeth Garrett (who had slipped in through a loophole) had made their way, led to furious academic resistance. The University reneged on its own regulations, and when ...”

“... in his pocket, unable to speak French and not knowing anybody there, and before long was the king of dressmakers. Each season he held court, showing several designs in his atelier (on live models!) to select clients, who would choose their outfits and be measured up inhouse. Empress Eugénie, his foremost patron, was still waited on at the Elysée (until ...”