“... 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 ...”

“... Joseph, one of Thatcher’s closest Party allies, in the early 1970s. (One is reminded of the film Elizabeth, and of its heroine’s no less momentous and politically charged declaration: ‘I have become a Virgin.’) Joseph’s remark, Thatcher writes in her memoirs, acted on her as a revelation and a summons to action. The Conservative Party and ...”

“... in which they were written, we get to the very heart of loss. Happiness is rare in these stories. Elizabeth Jolley’s ‘Five Acre Virgin’ stands almost alone, dissolving into You-Can’t-Take-It-With-You amiability when slapdash Mother finds a husband for her ample sister. There are, on the other hand, only two stories – Cynthia Rich’s ‘My ...”

“... of South Bend, Indiana, who is green as a corn husk. Nor does the former Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, who, like Sanders, is far to the left of American mainstream voters and almost certainly toast after doing surprisingly badly in New Hampshire. And good old Joe Six-Pack? I actually like Biden. He’s an Irish-American pol of an earlier vintage ...”

“... from someone in his own town who couldn’t afford to eat. Food banks are extraordinarily new. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel of the Hungry Forties, Mary Barton, those who are ‘clemming’, or starving, just get used to it. And those who are not can barely imagine it. George Wilson in that novel goes to ask the mill-owner’s help for a friend who’s ...”

“... and designers, as if killing and dying were just an excuse for expensive art and theatricals. Elizabeth Banks, as the producer Effie Trinket, wears one improbable wig after another, and would win any prize available for the most extravagant false eyelashes. Stanley Tucci, as a television presenter, camps up every act of violence and political betrayal as ...”

“... Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Falcon (Anthony Mackie), War Machine (Don Cheadle), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). Between them, they can fly, mechanically calibrate distances, drop bombs, kickbox like maniacs, and shoot fire from their fingers, but they have a hard time winning the day, and they do burn a chunk of the hospital and kill some people by ...”

“... as well as the menu. An appearance of effortless sophistication is the middle-class ideal. Elizabeth David not only brightened postwar Britain with the flavours of the Mediterranean, she wrote in a way that reassured the large number of women and some men who were learning to cook for themselves that there was nothing demeaning about it. Her books are ...”