“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... That the English have been slow to recognise James Merrill as the best poet in the language after Elizabeth Bishop has long seemed strange to Americans. Come to think of it, British recognition of Bishop herself was belated; for decades she was upstaged by Robert Lowell, probably because he lived in England and behaved in a way that seemed more certifiably poetic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to Horace Walpole; the Countess of Belvidere, after her imprisonment in Ireland for adultery; Lady Elizabeth Foster, mistress of the Duke of Devonshire and bosom friend of his Duchess; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was drawn to Italy by her love for the ambidextrous Francesco Algarotti and then took up with a Brescian count who swindled her; the free-thinking ...”

“... including Colette, Edith Head, Deborah Kerr, Leslie Caron, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Marni Nixon, Julie Andrews, Mia Farrow, Jeanne Moreau, Merle Oberon, Capucine and Cher. I could advance a lesbian interpretation of Audrey Hepburn’s oeuvre, though that is not my present aim: instead, I wish to inquire into reverberations ...”

“... fleeing to California at the expense of an as yet unknown young Canadian admirer called Elizabeth Smart. Smart had read Barker’s poems and fallen in love with their author at a distance, determining in advance to bear him children on the grounds that they ‘would all be wonderful poets’. Her fixation might have been harmless if she hadn’t had ...”

“... by the nationalist politician John MacCormick against the assumption by the new queen of the style Elizabeth II – though she was patently the first monarch by the name of Elizabeth to reign over the post-1707 United Kingdom. Although Cooper found that MacCormick had no standing to bring the case and that the queen’s ...”

“... whose ‘wits were turned with solitude and freedom’, the obscure and melancholy Anne Finch, Elizabeth Carter, ‘the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek’, and of course her own creation, the mute inglorious poet buried opposite the Elephant and Castle, Shakespeare’s ...”

“... to fire up a dinner party. I don’t fully understand the sources of Mencken’s anger, and Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, though she has written a balanced and formidably well-informed biography, does little to elucidate them. ‘Infancy, that nonage Mencken defined as the larval stage of his life, began for him on 12 September 1880,’ she tells us. ‘Of his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... she once trained to be a nun. Although she never took her vows, her former mentor, Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), is willing to hide them. Much of the rest of the film follows Kellner’s violent escapades, even as he fails to act on the information he has stolen. There is, however, a brief flicker of a great film when Scanlon uses a mysterious form of ...”