“... There are maps both in Elizabeth Wilson’s book, which deals with bohemians in general, and in Andrew Barrow’s, which is a study of two in particular, but the street plans of Soho, Paris or Munich are not much use as a guide to the subject. Bohemia is a country of the mind, a flying island that may land anywhere and take off again just as quickly ...”

“... traders reached Russia, bringing, among other things, armaments, and wary messages from Queen Elizabeth and her government, with vague promises of political asylum for the paranoid tyrant and suggestions of brides (Elizabeth herself, de Madariaga believes, was never a possible consort for the tsar). Though he never ...”

“... perfectly controls his own fate.’ Like J.A. Froude, balancing the books on Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, Elton believed that all Henry’s achievements were those of others, and above all the towering achievement of his minister Thomas Cromwell, whose idea it was to declare UDI on the pope, and, in effect, the rest of Europe. Not all of those who came ...”

“... who seeks treatment – unmarried men with inherited money.’ But in Freud’s Free Clinics, Elizabeth Danto shows that thanks to Freud’s speech in Budapest and the enthusiastic response to it, ‘between 1918 and 1938 psychoanalysis was neither impractical for working people, nor rigidly structured, nor luxurious in length.’ During the interwar ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that it’s difficult to agree when the series of murders began. The killing in April 1888 of Emma Elizabeth Smith was probably a street robbery and gang-rape, but is sometimes reckoned as the first of the Whitechapel murderer’s crimes. The murder on 7 August of Martha Tabram is attributed by some to an unidentified soldier while others identify it as the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... people in Havana.Three decades later, with Castro still at the helm, another American scholar, Elizabeth Dore (who worked in the UK for much of her life), began planning a similar project: to interview Cubans about their lives and the way they felt about the revolution. Dore had funding and a rotating cast of about a dozen interviewers, but she didn’t ...”

“... because it made him seem indispensable. Two hundred years later, another childless monarch, Elizabeth I, had John Hayward imprisoned in the Tower for dedicating a book on the events of 1399 to her rebellious former favourite, the Earl of Essex. The queen found it seditious even to broach the topic of a past tyrannicide; Essex’s supporters planned to ...”