“... some fairly celebrated figures in the lesbian haut monde. A friend of mine once had dinner with Elizabeth Bishop and her lover. Another met Marguerite Yourcenar. At Yale in the 1980s one of Blakey’s best friends slept with – well, perhaps you can guess. (True – the closet case actress!) Someone else I know went to a party in a Chicago highrise and ...”

“... tunic herself. A whole extended family is constructed around her: the life stories of her cousin Elizabeth and her mother St Anne (and her three husbands) embellish the legend. Mary’s image becomes intimate, even banal. Joseph, squeezed out of the nativity scene by magi, shepherds and livestock, makes himself useful at the periphery of religious ...”

“... seems to have taken part in a drunken romp which led to his assaulting Maria’s sister-in-law Elizabeth … Tradition has it that Burns was helping re-enact the Roman Rape of the Sabine Women.’ Scott Hogg, in contrast, follows Catherine Carswell’s version and presents the scene as a right-wing plot against radical Rob. The ladies had withdrawn after ...”

“... she got caught up in Robert Lowell’s fevered attempts to have the institution’s director, Elizabeth Ames, dismissed for being a secret Communist. O’Connor was, by all accounts, and despite her ingrained shyness and acute scepticism, mesmerised by Lowell, whose exuberant but erratic embrace of the doctrines of Catholicism during this period led him ...”

“... that seems at first surprising for she was not, in any usual sense, a good letter writer. Unlike Elizabeth Bowen or Penelope Fitzgerald, with both of whom she might be compared as a novelist, there is no sense of her trying out obviously literary ideas. There is scant detail in description, little incident and the few character sketches are laconic. Léonie ...”

“... letters of dependent family members was common, if resented. In the 1740s, the young bluestocking Elizabeth Robinson (later Montagu) was appalled to find that her mother had read and disapproved of a flippant letter she had written to her sister. Nor cou’d I imagine that I was writing what anyone wou’d read except [Sarah] herself; if I had thought so, I ...”

“... of voices to understand its democratic imperative.’ Just as Nafisi’s book group would look at Elizabeth Bennet and Catherine Earnshaw and see themselves, rebelliously pulling off their headscarves and discussing banned books, Western readers would look to them to put their wine and houmus in a more serious light. If readers were seduced by Iran’s ...”

“... of an Anglo-German alliance. Nobody should be surprised that he taught his young nieces, Princess Elizabeth (the future queen) and Princess Margaret, the Nazi salute – not as a satirical gesture, but as a trivialising piece of play. More surprising is the evidence Urbach presents that his brother, who became George VI after Edward was forced to abdicate in ...”

“... Harold Nicolson, found the remains of a great courtyard house that had once played host to Elizabeth I. It was already in ruins when Horace Walpole saw it in 1752 and all that now survived was one low range of buildings and a single great tower. Restoring it was a daunting prospect and Harold pointed out that for the same money they could buy an intact ...”

“... the belly’ to avoid execution) at the cost of sixpence. When the Quaker penal reformer Elizabeth Fry visited Newgate in 1813, she found three hundred women detained in a space designed for fifty, crammed together regardless of age or offence.By contrast, the new Victorian houses of correction discouraged idleness and tried to induce reflection. In ...”

“... the Checkered Game of Life, invented by Milton Bradley in 1860, which was itself a reinvention of Elizabeth Newbery and John Wallis’s moralising New Game of Human Life from 1790. The 18th-century version had a snakes-and-ladders set-up: players were sent forward to maturity when they landed on virtues and back to childhood when they landed on vices. It was ...”

“... of Harold and Essie Craxton, who tumbled up in a ramshackle household in St John’s Wood. Elizabeth Jane Howard, who knew them all when she was young and later wove them into her Cazalet novels, described the Craxtons as exuding happiness like pollen, which rubbed off. The pianist Harold Isaacs remembered overcrowded Acomb Lodge as ‘a very strange ...”

“... Avenue, which he nicknamed the Caviar Club, enjoying the food and the opportunities for gossip. Elizabeth Taylor was at that time involved in ‘a highly complicated romantic relationship’ with Ardeshir Zahedi, the Iranian ambassador to Washington, and Warhol was able to tell friends that Zahedi ‘was getting nervous about her getting ...”

“... desire to be liked, is a gift to an author and the reader throughout is on her side. Had it been Elizabeth I it might have been a celebratory masque, as Her Majesty comes well out of every encounter, besting her ministers, her courtiers and even her devoted subjects.I never met the queen except once as part of an assembly line and I’m glad as I would have ...”

“... of Portsmouth where his father, John Dickens, worked in the Naval Pay Office. His mother, Elizabeth, is reported to have claimed that she went to a ball on the night before his birth; but no ball is mentioned in the area for that particular evening and it is likely that this is one of the many apocryphal stories which sprung up around the birth and ...”