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“... 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 The ladies had withdrawn after ...”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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the fashion feature which, in the Forties and Fifties, brought to mind a scene from a novel by Elizabeth Bowen, or a short story by Somerset Maugham, expanded to include Genet, The Story of O and comic books. Evans and Thornton spend some time analysing the feminist position on femininity, and here the disapproving tones of 15th-century Venetian officials ...”

“... these views – as many did and do. Take the Duke and Duchess of Windsor: King George VI and Queen Elizabeth knew, Harris writes, that the Duke ‘was irresponsible, insensitive, feckless. He never paused to consider the implications of what he said and did. They put nothing past the mesmeric influence on him of “that woman”.’ When it’s another royal ...”

“... takes the reader Right Off the Map, Eliot invites him to join the ‘Journey of the Magi’, and Elizabeth Bowen allows him to live in The Hotel.’ It is significant that, in what is still the age of the great Cunarders, somebody calls a popular play Outward Bound, and that Yeats, having to find a title for a poem, decides not on ‘Going’ or ...”

“... strictly sited, while Wilson’s novel is stringent as situation and acquiescent as plot. Elizabeth Barrett pinpointed the malaise which Robert Browning probed: ‘When a man spins evermore on his own axis, like a child’s toy I saw the other day ... what is the use of him but to make a noise?’ And when a man like Horace Nettleship or a gentleman ...”

“... would either coax or magic away your doubts.Some hares were also witches, or fairy-folk. Elizabeth Goudge’s astonishing children’s book of 1946, The Little White Horse, written just as the war ended, revels in sugar biscuits and exquisite beauties, and the hare is one the finest beauties of all. They are not, a boy explains, like rabbits: ‘A ...”

“... fact asked.Ní Chuilleanáin’s narrative poems are tales of ‘life with the lid on’, to echo Elizabeth Bowen. Her protagonists are typically nameless: a woman on her way to join a convent, a swineherd, a group of traveller women cooking round a campfire. Her style, with its absence of rhyme and its angular line breaks, is correspondingly muted. Compare ...”

“... Age cannot wither her, but it doesn’t improve her much either. Not when she is Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra. Age seems simply to have left her alone, as it often does with movie actors. But then the chance of time travel is very real, especially since a restored print of the film is now showing at various cinemas around the country ...”