“... 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 ...”

“... is so natural and interesting that one might even wonder why it hasn’t been treated before. Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot (née Bosanquet), Mary Midgley (née Scrutton) and Iris Murdoch all matriculated at Oxford in the late 1930s. When most of the men went off to war, they found themselves, as women philosophy students, in a very unusual situation ...”

“... system of racial superiority to back up their prejudices. Historians of English racism often cite Elizabeth I’s proclamations in 1596 and 1601 against the presence of so many ‘blackamoors’, and note that the Crown hired a Lübeck merchant to remove black people on both occasions. But Elizabeth’s complaint focused on ...”

“... and services on one side and family apartments on the other.The Renaissance finally arrived during Elizabeth’s reign. She was less greedy for buildings than her father and was a patron by proxy, shrewdly encouraging ambitious courtiers to build glamorous houses for her entertainment, rather than paying for them herself. When she gave Kenilworth Castle to her ...”

“... According to the magus John Dee, whose antiquarian researches captured the attention of the queen, Elizabeth had ‘title royal to all the coasts and islands beginning at or about Terra Florida, and so alongst, or near unto Atlantis [America], going northerly, and then to all the most northern islands great and small, and so compassing about ...”

“... unveiled in the posthumous edition of Vive Moi! – long-running affairs with the writers Elizabeth Bowen and Honor Tracy and the American socialite Alene Erlanger – add to the dishonesty of his public image. Yet O’Faolain’s claim to heroism lies not in any righteous constancy but precisely in his inconsistency. Faced with the insistence of the ...”

“... the standard life (1913) by W. and R.A. Austen-Leigh.* The chief additions, for many years, were Elizabeth Jenkins’s Jane Austen (1938); the concise but illuminating early chapters of Mary Lascelles’s Jane Austen and Her Art (1939); and R.W. Chapman’s close work on the documents, first published in notes to his unrivalled edition of the novels and his ...”

“... of disappointment and morbidity is largely filled in by a long, long chapter on L.E.L. – Letitia Elizabeth Landon. The length of this chapter urges it to become a mini-biography in itself, and its abnormal extension in relation to other chapters distorts the shape of the book. Landon evidently fascinates Greer, however loathsome she claims to find the verses ...”