“... escape from a home where he was stripped of authority and placed under constant surveillance. As Elizabeth Foyster remarks in her assiduously researched, crisply written biography, ‘nobody was interested in the grievances of a low-born French speaker when they stood opposed to the words of an honourable English nobleman and his family.’ Not long after ...”

“... the rift could be summarised in 1066 and All That terms as Queen Mary, the queen mother and Queen Elizabeth, right but repulsive; the Windsors, wrong but romantic. What he found most unforgivable about the royal family was their lack of taste. His notes record a constant assault on his sensibilities from their sheer dreariness. Sandringham ‘had to be seen ...”

“... if never completed, transformation in the 1920s and 1930s. This transformation is at the heart of Elizabeth McGuire’s engrossing book. She is not the first to approach the history of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China in tandem, yet Red at Heart offers a highly original exploration of Chinese communism, putting the experiences and emotions of the young ...”

“... us, however, that elite women were sometimes tutored in the same way at home. Some of them, like Elizabeth Cary and Mary Sidney, wrote closet dramas that allowed women themselves to perform women’s passions.Noble women like Sidney, Cary and indeed Elizabeth I were tutored in modern languages as well as ancient ones. This ...”

“... Mary’s death, he immediately looked into the possibility of winning the hand of her half-sister, Elizabeth. Don John of Austria, Philip’s illegitimate half-brother, later to achieve immortality at Lepanto and the son of a scullery maid at a hotel in Regensburg where Charles had once stayed, also fancied his chances at bringing England back to the True ...”

“... heaven’; he is quite ‘drunk’ with it. Walter Raleigh pined like a spurned lover when Elizabeth I turned her attentions to the Earl of Essex. George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more affection than between lovers in the best kind’. Lucy Hughes-Hallett wonders, in her biography of ...”

“... and in her British Council guide, Iris Murdoch. Her analysis is extended and continued here, in Elizabeth Dipple’s very good book, which traces the whole course of development from Under the Net to Nuns and Soldiers. Professor Dipple uses Iris Murdoch’s philosophical essays to illuminate the novels with perceptiveness and sensitivity to conceptual ...”

“... with importing Western academic conventions. Under Peter the Great and his successors, the Empress Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, Russia’s Imperial Academy of Arts produced artists – however great their technical ability and however great their talent – who were ultimately indistinguishable from their European counterparts in style and subject ...”

“... you dislike (or sometimes envy), and of ‘cleanse’ to justify what you do to destroy it. Elizabeth Pisani’s particularly lively essay, ‘Leviticus Be Damned’, deals with ritual cleansing, and the whole array of what is, in one context or another, reckoned to be unclean – from lobsters, menstruation and the filthy rich to sex and dirty ...”

“... for, that I wondered if the whole thing was an elaborate joke I’d missed. Meades’s take on an Elizabeth David recipe for sauce au vin du Médoc, which David credited to ‘Madame Bernard, the wife of a wine-grower of Cissac-Médoc’ (Meades wonders whether David ‘emulated [the] deadpan cunning’ of the painter Christian Schad, ‘and invented ...”

“... of Spokane, one-time Lilac Princess at school, millionaire biographer of Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, looks not all that different from her current subject. There is the same bright, taut face which a good surgical lift always ensures, the same immaculately-dyed and coiffeured hair, the same fixed smile exhibiting the kind of ...”

“... as a food writer? Not me, at any rate. The Garden of Eden is studded with provincial delicacies Elizabeth David would be proud of (‘jamon serrano, a smoky, hard-cured ham from pigs that fed on acorns’) and dramatic narratives of eating and drinking that might please M.F.K. Fisher. The book is a sort of domestic novel, a portrait of amour fou and its ...”

“... to health. But miraculously it does come back to Dickie for a moment. She wrote a biography of Elizabeth of Austria, and ‘it was taken by the Elizabeth Club, who said it was the best biography ever written about her. They told Lord Mountbatten how pleased they were with it when he visited Vienna.’ You see? What goes ...”

“... Not everything Barbauld writes has this power, this precision or this delicate clarity. But Elizabeth Kraft and William McCarthy, who edited this volume, doubt that either her lapses into mediocrity or changing tastes can account for the decline in her reputation, which they blame chiefly on the anti-feminism of the Romantic poets and their ...”

“... monarchy from Queen Victoria, via Queen Alexandra, Queen Mary and the Queen Mother, to Queen Elizabeth II and the Princess of Wales. These early royal philanthropists probably gave more in terms of money than they did in terms of time. But with Victoria and Albert, this state of affairs was reversed, and the familiar pattern was established whereby the ...”