“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... monarchy from Queen Victoria, via Queen Alexandra, Queen Mary and the Queen Mother, to Queen Elizabeth II and the Princess of Wales. These early royal philanthropists probably gave more in terms of money than they did in terms of time. But with Victoria and Albert, this state of affairs was reversed, and the familiar pattern was established whereby the ...”

“... Not everything Barbauld writes has this power, this precision or this delicate clarity. But Elizabeth Kraft and William McCarthy, who edited this volume, doubt that either her lapses into mediocrity or changing tastes can account for the decline in her reputation, which they blame chiefly on the anti-feminism of the Romantic poets and their ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to health. But miraculously it does come back to Dickie for a moment. She wrote a biography of Elizabeth of Austria, and ‘it was taken by the Elizabeth Club, who said it was the best biography ever written about her. They told Lord Mountbatten how pleased they were with it when he visited Vienna.’ You see? What goes ...”

“... 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 ...”