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“... In​ Olive, Again, her seventh book, Elizabeth Strout returns to her character Olive Kitteridge, a maths teacher in small-town Maine. A number of the chapters in Strout’s first, eponymous book about the character had already appeared in print as short stories before the novel’s publication in 2008, so that Olive Kitteridge is really half a novel, half a collection of stories; Olive, Again and most of Strout’s other books have the same hybrid form ...”

“... In the royal numerals case of 1953 – which concerned whether the new queen should style herself Elizabeth II in Scotland, where there had never been an Elizabeth I – the Scottish judge Lord Cooper made the controversial pronouncement that the unlimited sovereignty of parliament was an exclusively English concept, which ...”

“... life there, yet turned her back on the place fairly determinedly in her fiction. Her real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh, and she was the daughter of Colin MacKintosh, a fruiterer who had pulled himself up into prosperity and respectability from humble beginnings. His parents were ‘illiterate Gaelic-speaking crofters’; his father came to Inverness to work ...”

“... the Anne Royal, to the Downs in September 1619. He had previously held a household position under Elizabeth I; travelled from La Coruña to Valladolid as part of the delegation sent by James VI and I to ratify an Anglo-Spanish alliance in 1605; commanded an expedition to Guiana in 1610, enthusiastically supported by the imprisoned Sir Walter Raleigh; and ...”

“... old Christian prohibition on usury. Henry VIII legalised it; Edward VI recriminalised it; since Elizabeth I restored her father’s financial initiative in 1571 – albeit with a cap of 10 per cent – lending and borrowing money at interest has stealthily metamorphosed from rarity to commonplace, from commonplace to norm and from norm to something like a ...”

“... with low-relief images of staple subjects for tourist tat: a Routemaster bus, a Union Jack, Queen Elizabeth I, Big Ben, Tower Bridge and so forth. His response to the roughly worked surfaces and cloddish weight of the bronzes he has chosen – the almost featureless head by William Turnbull, for example, or the alien-like figure standing on three prongs by ...”

“... horn of the Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor.’ This was not Elizabeth I’s only narwhal tusk. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Raleigh’s half-brother, presented her with a gem-encrusted narwhal tusk worth £10,000 (enough, at the time, to buy and staff a small castle). It was, he told her, a ‘sea-unicorn’. Gilbert’s ...”

“... though they’re not perhaps meant to be as comic as they are. Louise Dresser, playing the Empress Elizabeth, sounds exactly like Groucho Marx in Duck Soup when she says: ‘That’s the chancellor. Steals more money from me in a week than I collect in taxes in a year.’Title cards tell most of the story, reminding us that 18th-century Russia was a place of ...”

“... portraits.Versace does not go quite so far and suggests more than he shows. That black dress Elizabeth Hurley wore to a film premiere – slit and safety-pinned up the side and open almost to the waist in front – has its place in a history which includes the dress with its black calyx-like bodice out of which white shoulders flower in John Singer ...”

“... Lately it has invited artists in to play.There was a time when they went there to work, as Mrs Elizabeth Blackwell did, to make the five hundred drawings from live plants which illustrate her Curious Herbal (1735). Her efforts helped her husband, who was in prison for debt; he later got caught up in politics and was executed in Sweden. Her engravings are ...”

“... is Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, a downmarket rewrite of Iago. When Wickham denounces Darcy to Elizabeth Bennet he does exactly what the best liars do. He tells her what ‘she found herself was apt and true’ – or, in the terminology the novel invites us to use, he speaks directly to her prejudices. Wickham knows ...”

“... was a Habsburg and a Catholic, and was nominally but not personally an arch-enemy of Elizabeth.) Kelley was also receiving regular letters from Lord Burghley, the Queen’s chief adviser, begging him to return home ‘to honour Her Majesty … with the fruits of such great knowledge as God hath given him’. Or if he could not personally ...”

“... Mansfield’, her usual favourite, jostled for prominence with Käthe Schönfeld, Matilda Berry, Elizabeth Stanley, Julian Mark, Mrs K. Bendall, Kass, Katharina, Katoushka and Kissienka. The stories she told about herself often didn’t add up – biographers pick and choose which to believe, and hope for the best. Her handwriting was close to illegible, so ...”

“... on themselves: do I matter? It is a reaction to the totality presented in the poems. This is what Elizabeth Hardwick heard in Plath’s 1962 BBC recordings, and we must trust the diamond-hardness of Hardwick’s ear, sending out its ray like Marco’s stickpin in The Bell Jar:I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath reading. It was not anything like I could have ...”

“... general appear very unfavourably impressed by this poem, very unjustly, Robert and I think’: so Elizabeth Barrett Browning shortly after its publication. Larkin’s judgment in 1969 was very unjust to the body of the work. What predominates in a writer’s image is not necessarily the same as what makes that writer worth reading. Moncure Conway, along with ...”