“... their estates and much of their culture unaffected by English ways. Moreover, James VI inherited Elizabeth’s throne more by dynastic accident than political inevitability. When he tried to unify his kingdoms, the House of Commons would not accept it. Did he even intend a full union? Jenny Wormald suggests that, as a shrewd negotiator, James advocated ...”

“... Why does one have these reactions: why is it not possible to be indifferent? Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn have written an introduction to the latest of the Mellon Centre Studies in British Art, Frederic Leighton, which worries at the subject. The centenary exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1996 was greeted with critical abuse: ‘flamboyant ...”

“... wing of the movement, Umkhonto we Sizwe, so that their remains might be reinterred in Port Elizabeth. Matters got off to a bad start in a city famous for housing the state bureaucracy. ANC officials failed to produce the necessary court order, or to make certain that the proposed exhumation took place in the presence of the police. The result was a ...”

“... of the method is the concluding interpretation of Flush, Woolf’s playful ‘biography’ of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, here solemnly discovered to contain a repressed autobiographical account of her flirtation with her brother-in-law, Clive Bell. Elizabeth Barrett turns out to be Vanessa, Robert Browning ...”

“... another instinct. Scott knew that the poet had been a child during Leicester’s courtship of Elizabeth, but he chose to ignore it for the sake of romance. Once Shakespeare became a character, a romantic hero like Rob Roy, known facts were suddenly flexible. Apocryphal episodes like the deer-stealing became, in the wake of Scott, not a means of ...”

“... a new truth. All he can hope for is a ‘faint preserved outline where the truth once lay’. In Elizabeth’s England, men lied to their reflection; and Marlowe belonged to a shadow world of espionage, where every straight action is mirrored by treachery, where the agent provocateur is king. Charles Nicholl has previously written on alchemy in the ...”

“... elevation of Colin Powell into some sort of co-candidate and the exceptional prominence given to Elizabeth Dole, who made the most of her opportunity by wading into the crowd on the floor to do her husband’s This Is Your Life, broadened the production’s appeal by presenting four stars instead of two. Besides, Dole has the merit of being a poor ...”

“... closer to each other, and I recognised the not-quite-extraterrestrial, dumpy, middle-aged forms of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton panting their way up the hill. The glow was not, of course, from their outward perfection, nor their inner beauty and wisdom, but the result of years and years of attention from precision-ground lenses and high-wattage lights ...”

“... way round, while Alan Chedzoy’s life of the first Mrs Sheridan (the noted soprano and beauty Elizabeth Linley) is more boisterously entertaining than either of them. The subject of all this feverish activity was born in Ireland to a theatrical father and moved with his family to England at the age of eight. After a miserable period at Harrow, the young ...”

“... in July 1536 Margaret was very close indeed to the succession, since Henry’s daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, were both at this point not regarded as legitimate. Cromwell softly suggests a way for Margaret Douglas to foreswear Howard and avoid the fury of the king: ‘You say that Lord Thomas has visited you in the queen’s chambers. All come there, I do ...”

“... the unpredicted and unpredictable devastation in Kobe. There aren’t any frogs or worms in Susan Elizabeth Hough’s fascinating and clearly written Earthshaking Science. One of the most conceptually striking things Hough points out is that, from a seismologist’s point of view, what most people call an earthquake, the quaking of the earth, is known as ...”

“... one of the strengths of her fiction. In The Wind Changes, an Irish novel, her central character, Elizabeth, instigates most of the amatory episodes, unexpectedly kissing a Republican leader ‘hardly [sic], spitefully and with anger’. Soon afterwards she’s having sex with the married Arion, who may be a spy working for the British against the ...”

“... to call yourself something else, but there is no guarantee that anyone else will follow suit. Elizabeth Abbott’s panoramic survey contains numerous examples of women who find themselves loving unavailable men but feeling disgust at the label of mistress (how happy they would have been to know that one day they would find themselves in a book subtitled ...”

“... the term ‘Janeite’ in 1894, made a point of his readiness ‘to live with and to marry’ Elizabeth Bennet and serve as ‘a knight (or at least a squire) of the order of St Jane’. In 1949, after writing two books about Austen, Sheila Kaye-Smith had a conversation with her about electric lamps and radios. Inevitably there have been squabbles over ...”

“... century that was going on outside. The ménage starts off familial: a few servants, plus Mary Elizabeth Riordan, a talented and lovely piano student from ‘an immigrant family that had suffered major misfortune’. She leaves for the Sisters of Mercy Junior College and Langley marries a lady of good family called Lila van Dijk, who ‘had a mind to ...”