“... cartoonists often call him) burst out of exile and raised an army. She reports, via Princess Elizabeth, to the British royal family, using, lest the letters be intercepted, a code that would have delighted Murasaki since it consists of calling the personages of the royal family by such names as Magnolia and Honey Suckle. She notes that in France it is ...”

“... a showroom on Fifth Avenue and sending a set of dinnerware as a prenuptial gift for Princess Elizabeth. Tupperware was presented to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and the Maharaja of Ender, and in 1948 the Tupper ‘Millionaire Line’ of houseware won a major award from the journal Plastics World. But the reputation of ...”

“... Edward VI. The standard of living to which they then grew accustomed became a heavy burden under Elizabeth, whose favours to the family were intermittent and grudging. From the late 16th century to the late 17th – from the time of Sir Philip Sidney to that of his great-nephew the republican Algernon Sidney – there runs a current of failure and ...”

“... Morrison ... was Secretary of State to the Lord Monjoy, our chief Governour, in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth,’ says Sheridan, so he ‘had the best oportunity, of knowing the State of this Nation at that time’. An Irish rebellion led by ringleaders of English extraction, a pattern which seems to have remained consistent in Irish history to the time of ...”

“... school friends would make him uneasy, in case they ‘remembered the words that I said the day the King was beheaded’. Scholarships took him to Cambridge, where he might have been expected to prepare for the law or the church, but he doesn’t seem to have pursued any particular career. Illness may have checked his ambition: bladder stones left him in a ...”

“... 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. ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... incestuous, Austen reserves the excitement of conflict for those characters erotically attracted: Elizabeth and Darcy, Emma and Knightley.But these arguments are unnecessary given a simple fact. Sense and Sensibility is not about two sisters; it is about three sisters. 19-year-old Elinor and 17-year-old Marianne have a sister, the 13-year-old ...”