“... 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 ...”

“... Colour brought photographs of champion roses (‘Birmingham Post’, a cross between ‘Queen Elizabeth’ and ‘Wendy Cussons’, from the National Rose Society’s Annual) and of rather dull canapés (from Good Housekeeping Colour Cookery of 1967). Nothing, it seemed, was so distant, hidden or commonplace that its appearance would be unrecorded for ...”

“... winner. As with horses, so with humans: the futurologist becomes a consultant to a wealthy owner; Elizabeth Zada, the animal psychic, gets the billionaire’s hand in marriage and a lucrative publishing deal. Randomness is accommodated within this pattern in the unpredictable fortunes of six thoroughbreds. The animals’ movements across states and continents ...”

“... the placing of images in sequence. I’ve mentioned one or two instances, and here’s another. Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun fades into a shot from Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, which gives way to Nosferatu, only to return to the Rossellini film and the great, desolate moment when a boy throws himself to his death from a high floor of a bombed ...”

“... as the blue wall four years ago, it is because centrist Democrats, as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren constantly warned during the primary debates, have refused to learn the lessons of 2016. Biden’s campaign was only a tweaked version of Hillary Clinton’s failed playbook. This was illustrated most forcefully by Republican gains among Latino ...”

“... the decoration of confinement chambers was often strictly regulated. In 1489, when Elizabeth of York retired for the birth of her second child to King Henry VII, ordinances required that the chamber should be hung with ‘rich cloth of blue arras [tapestry incorporating gold and silver threads] with fleurs-de-lys of gold, without any other ...”

“... and varying tensions between private and public religious experience. These include Abel Evans, Elizabeth Rowe, Aaron Hill and Joseph Trapp, and even Robert Lowth, whose The Genealogy of Christ (1729) was written when he was still a schoolboy at Winchester, and the much-derided Sir Richard Blackmore. Johnson later respected Blackmore’s The Creation ...”

“... suggestive of an amorous courtly culture. She was as adept in the political uses of coquetterie as Elizabeth I of England. She owned mildly erotic books and her death chamber was hung with a tapestry of the Triumph of Eros as well as with one of the Miracle of the Mass. Much of her reputation for prudishness derived from her efforts to tidy up after her ...”