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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... euphemistically calls his chose, he can crow as loudly as Alan Clark. When his unfortunate wife, Elizabeth, finally discovers him with his hand up the skirt of her companion Deborah Willet, he is duly remorseful about being caught, but is rather pleased with himself for being able with perfect truthfulness to deny that he had kissed her. Pepys’s genius ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of others. Molesworth had been taught by William Gaskell, the Unitarian minister and husband of Elizabeth Gaskell, who was another accomplished practitioner of supernatural fiction. Gaskell’s ghost stories, more ambitious and substantial than Molesworth’s (try her unforgettable ‘Old Nurse’s Story’), were also written with serious purpose. She ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... manuals that contained birth figures and formed part of their continuing professional education. Elizabeth Hunt inscribed her manual: ‘Elizabeth Hunt her Booke not his’. Another woman wrote in her copy of The English Midwife Enlarged: ‘Mary Hillyer her book/god give her grace ther/unto look not to look but/to ...”