“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to Present an Exhibition of Capable Artworks by the Notable Hand of the Celebrated American, Kara Elizabeth Walker, Negress. This is very much the artist’s trademark, flouting the pieties which in her view conceal modern-day realities. The work of more recent historians of the Civil War and the plantations also inspires her later polemical fictions on the ...”

“... Immensely thin and hollow-eyed with long fingers and a large nose, he seemed to the actress Elizabeth Robins, who met him at a lunch party, to be merely the ‘uncertain ghost of Oscar’. Tate Britain’s exhibition (until 20 September) demonstrates how deceptive the cultivated appearance was, revealing the sheer scale of Beardsley’s industry and the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ribald speculations as to just what Petkanov might have done to merit the bestowal by Queen Elizabeth II of the Order of the Bath are, so far as I can see, the only thing in The Porcupine to betray its author’s English origins. Should the fallen Petkanov have been put on trial? The new regime, personified by Peter Solinsky, the Prosecutor General, is ...”

“... good for them, that potatoes were not sufficient fare. In an article in the current Tatler, Mrs Elizabeth David laments that Salaman did not include recipes: in fact, he includes several. This is one, for the soup served in Epping Workhouse in the last years of the 18th century: ‘4 lbs pickled pork, 6 stones of shins and legs, 6 lbs of skibling (meat ...”

“... up cannot easily be demonstrated convincingly by a novelist who has planned what is to happen (Elizabeth Bowen failed at the same technique in The Heat of the Day), but at the same time the childhood of those two is given a wonderfully creepy quality, which would not be retrospectively diminished had they settled down as blameless housewives in Gerrard’s ...”

“... These are the years of early fame after Sons and Lovers, and of the publication of The Rainbow and its banning, and of Lawrence’s violent and despairing reactions to the war. He was already a fully recognised writer, a probable genius, and his more intimate correspondents include Cynthia Asquith, Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell, Edward Marsh, Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, Philip Heseltine, Mark Gertler ...”

“... Unit’s ‘brilliant adviser’; Kevin Stowe was a ‘very able’ Principal Private Secretary, Elizabeth Arnot a ‘bright young education specialist’, John Lyons a ‘very able’ general secretary, and Tom McNally an ‘excellent political secretary’. They were all quite wonderful, brilliant and magnificent, but unfortunately they could not tackle ...”

“... the dust, they have to be here if I’m going to write a letter to Marie or Dorianne, Michael and Elizabeth have to be in their bodies for me not to cut them out of my own. They have to answer the phone when I call for me not to walk into the closet for ever. Right now I am sitting on the porch of the house I grew up in. The second place I was on earth! The ...”

“... the novel, that Maurice is tying a large brick to himself and preparing to walk into the sea. As Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, ‘Novels that are profoundly about illicit fornication have a way of ending on accidents, illness or death.’ Night Boat to Tangier is no different. Maurice, like his father before him, ends up in a mental institution that he ...”

“... From the Spiritual Diary of Dr Dee’ draws from the writings of the occultist and astrologer to Elizabeth I, who addresses his thoughts to an uncommon lover: ‘In the beginning was you, Word. I new it.’Like Philip the Handsome, John Dee identified with his biblical counterpart. ‘I am John,’ he says, the John who began his gospel: ‘In the beginning ...”