“... from the US in Diamonds Are Forever he entered ‘the great safe, black British belly of the Queen Elizabeth’. Yet even the black British womb of queen and country turned out to be infiltrated by American gangsters and assassins. Empire on the turn and all that. His favourite moment, though, had to be seeing the naked Honeychile Rider on the beach in Dr No ...”

“... Catching the voices of servants themselves is not easy, though the occasional one rings out. Elizabeth Hands, writing about the disdainful surprise that news of her writing met with, was especially tart: ‘A servant write verses!’ says Madame du Bloom ‘Pray what is the subject – a Mop or a Broom?’ ‘He, he, he,’ says Miss Flounce: ‘I ...”

“... He pioneered the practice of giving his trucks female names: Twiggy, Joan Doreen, Excilie Elizabeth. They soon became something to be looked out for by bored motorway drivers on family schleps, or sales reps sick of Radio 4, who began to collect sightings of the ‘giants of the road’. Jools Holland publicised the craze, after his band passed the ...”

“... is a book published in 1940 called Our Princesses at Home, photographs commissioned by Queen Elizabeth of family life, with a saccharine and obviously royally approved commentary by the photographer, Lisa Sheridan. ‘We see here a royal duet at the piano. It is a pity that we cannot hear it also. The harmony which exists between the royal sisters is ...”

“... and before I even read the piece I felt victorious, because the issue opened with an essay by Elizabeth Hardwick. The glamour of the moment was helped when Barbara Epstein came to my party at the Old Town Bar. She walked in clutching a copy of the paper and proceeded to smoke all my cigarettes, speaking about Lizzie and Wystan and how a good piece was ...”

“... utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South).’ The book they were talking about was Douglas Crase’s The Revisionist. Out of print for almost forty years, it has now been reissued (Carcanet, £12.99) in a volume that also includes Crase’s only other collection of ...”

“... by precedent and by the constant repression of excess, partisanship and enthusiasm. Ever since Elizabeth I sacrificed her love life for the stability of the realm (deliberately casting shade on her lusty father’s reputation in the process), success as a monarch has been defined in popular culture largely as the uncomplaining suppression of private ...”

“... worked at Warhol’s Factory in New York, tangible evidence of which was a silkscreen head of Elizabeth Taylor on his wall. He was devoted to Forster and would often retell ‘Morgan’s latest’ bon mot or lightly scathing comment on one of the fellows, on whom he turned a rather sharp eye (including Michael Jaffé: ‘I can’t think Rubens would have ...”

“... distract sailors or bring bad luck at sea – which was just as well, because a topless carving of Elizabeth Fry or Florence Nightingale would certainly have been frowned on. Fry, who adorned a Victorian merchant ship, is depicted wearing a piecrust-collar shirt and bulky masculine jacket; Nightingale, from a similar vessel, has a capable-looking face with ...”

“... seeing the historical artist in the figure on the canvas.Self-identification, the art historian Elizabeth Cropper writes about Artemisia’s work, ‘has little to do with resemblance’. The appearance of what might be Artemisia’s features in a painting of Mary Magdalene doesn’t presuppose self-identification with the saint on the artist’s ...”

“... of something horrible that was sticking to them. A spectacular daube at a dinner party, recipe by Elizabeth David but with a freehand addition by the cook, had it – lips this time pursed, thumb and forefinger connected to indicate perfection. A work of art, of course, had a je ne sais quoi, spoken with wide eyes and lips apart to perform a look of ...”

“... David Attenborough​ was born in 1926, the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Elizabeth II. He began hosting Zoo Quest on BBC television in 1954; not quite seventy years later, his latest series, Wild Isles, has just finished airing (it’s still available on iPlayer, or Amazon Prime for those outside the UK ...”

“... Beauvoir – at least for a few more months – and in addition to quoting Shakespeare, Shelley, Elizabeth Bishop and Joseph Brodsky to your friends, you might be memorising apothegms from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, because even though you are enlightened and liberated, you are in pain over a man and jealous of his official girlfriend (you ...”

“... much more arbitrary than the longer critical haul of a century or two. For instance, shares in Elizabeth Bishop (d. 1979) are at an all-time high, helped by the timely publication of her letters; while shares in Philip Larkin (d. 1985) are at an all-time low, helped by the untimely publication of his ditto. Graham Greenes (d. 1991) are on the way ...”

“... rulers had long been alert to the possibility of veiled political allusion on the stage. Under Elizabeth, a principal target of suspicion had been the English history play. Why did that genre decline after her death, in a period when public interest in history was increasing? Had history become too sensitive an area for the drama? Were playwrights who ...”