“... that acclaimed productions of The Tempest (by Macready in 1838) and Midsummer Night’s Dream (by Elizabeth Vestris in 1840) must have prepared the public for paintings that took scenes from these plays as their subject, and it cannot be a coincidence that Maclise’s Undine (one of the few key pictures missing from the exhibition) was painted in the same ...”

“... descriptions evoke the excitement of occasions such as that on which ‘novelist’s daughter’ Elizabeth Mary Somerset Maugham married Mr Vincent Paravicini in a green and white lamé creation by Schiaparelli carrying a ‘crescent bouquet of mixed white flowers’ by Flower Decorations Ltd. ‘London’s most original wedding for many years’ was Nancy ...”

“... lover), were active in the women’s suffrage and anti-imperialism movements. They did not, as Elizabeth Hardwick put it, ‘remain on the upper deck’.The third and final room at Charleston is devoted to Hamnett’s drawings, many of them from the late 1910s. There are sketches from life-drawing classes, Paris café scenes and a rather vulnerable ...”

“... de force. Most memorable is the chapter which looks at Joseph Mankiewicz’s film Cleopatra, the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton extravaganza of 1962. Hughes-Hallett shows how the extraordinary popular appeal of this film was related to the personalities – as they were perceived by the public – of Taylor and Burton themselves. They did not just play ...”

“... of garlic, and John Minton’s seductive, and faintly Post-Impressionist, illustrations to Elizabeth David. Brooke, after the war, heads for the Mediterranean as fast as he possibly can, but, being Brooke, he is already deeply nostalgic for his Army days there and strives to reanimate certain epiphanic moments – with no success whatever. In his ...”

“... are and what, by dint of that fact, they are prone to do to each other and to women. In 1817, Mrs Elizabeth Inchbald pronounced: ‘This is a play which all men admire and which most women dislike.’ There is, in that sense, a beautiful irony in Lloyd’s choice of Henry IV as the second in her projected trilogy of all-female Shakespeare performances. Of ...”

“... radicalism. The pattern of industrialisation served to publicise the divide, as suggested by Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South, published in 1855; while in the early 21st century, Conservative MPs have become a scarcely less endangered species in north-eastern England than they are in Scotland, and are under pressure too in the ...”

“... such as the Lockean philosopher Catharine Cockburn, the bluestocking moralist Catharine Talbot and Elizabeth Montagu, the ‘Queen of the Blues’ – and their defence of female morals. With maternal devotion as their example, they carolled women’s ‘disinterested benevolence’ and ethical intuition. Their arguments were influential but hazardous. Taken ...”

“... 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 ...”