“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the populace, must remember, that their insolence in peace is bravery in war.’ Hurrah! As Elizabeth Einberg puts it, The March of the Guards to Finchley is ‘a work that aims to be both “serious and comic” in the fullest Hogarthian sense’. However reprehensible the behaviour of the grenadiers, the painting permits us to enjoy their ...”

“... peaceful anarchist, who wrote about the pleasures of masturbation and orgasm. Another friend was Elizabeth Holmes, a contributor to Liberty, who had a child from a free union and had been Benjamin Tucker’s lover. Friends remembered Holmes as an intellectual, more fond of books than housework: ‘She’d dust a leg of the piano, go out and read ...”

“... Etonians into publishing the story that they threw puddings at each other annually in honour of Elizabeth I. He claimed to have bonded with Cecil Rhodes after urging him to buy an ingeniously long-handled brush for washing one’s back. His boyish enthusiasm for new technologies never left him. At fifteen, he was the daredevil rider of a high-wheel 52-inch ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... file.’ The only blot on Wyatt’s record was his marriage to the daughter of a Kentish baron, Elizabeth Brooke. We do not know if it was a match of love or strategy, but we do know that the partnership was a failure, and ended in Elizabeth being cast off. The gossip at court was that ‘laquelle il avoit chassee de la ...”

“... in Sylva for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t need a spatula to enjoy Elizabeth David.) There was an ash tree outside our house in Kentish Town: I know because I had to ask the council to lop away some of the upper growth as it came closer to the bedroom window. (The ancient tree in James’s story is uncomfortably close to the ...”

“... 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 ...”