“... London, the latter represented by 131,000 items. It has also purchased the archive of the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, Amis’s second wife. The Huntington’s Rare Book Room closes for an hour at noon and most of its readers stroll across the gardens to a shaded outdoor restaurant. Amis would barely recognise as lunch the meal most of us eat here: nobody ...”

“... and Leavis. He has given several long poems entire: the Rubáiyát, Clough’s Amours de Voyage, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese – but not a word of her Aurora Leigh – Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night and Meredith’s Modern Love – which Leavis despised as ‘the flashy product of ...”

“... the Presbyterian alderman and mayor of London. The Duke of Monmouth had an illegitimate child with Elizabeth Waller, the daughter of the Parliamentarian general, Sir William. The experiments of the 1650s were swept away as king, lords and bishops were thrust back into power with hardly a shot fired. The armies of the Commonwealth melted away, its tortured ...”

“... of which he had become an editor, and with the Nonconformist zeal that shaped the writing of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her protest poem ‘The Cry of the Children’, whose sensational success helped to prepare the ground for the Factory Act of 1844, was influenced by Horne’s investigative work. Here, only death can make a girl happy: If you listen ...”

“... and Cecilia have gone. (It is still there in the longer version but it is there only a beginning.) Elizabeth Bowen, it seems, read the novella with interest, but thought it cloying, except when it echoed Dusty Answer. The author is invited to drop by at the office for a glass of wine whenever she has the time. Had she, by the way, a sister at Girton six or ...”

“... its beginning from the female sex’. We must hope that the likes of Baroness Thatcher, Elizabeth Windsor, the Emperor Akihito and James Callaghan were informed of this when they were inducted into the order. Unfortunately for those of you keen to check the reference, the book has no notes, only a further reading list which has no mention of Signore ...”

“... the nightly spectacle of animals rending, drowning and swallowing each other on television. Queen Elizabeth I’s coronation speech is said to have been supported by loyal roars from the Tower lions. Were these, Hahn wonders, stage-managed? Like her subjects, the Queen was happy to see animals baited. On one of her progresses she watched a battle royal ...”

“... to stay at his house in London, where we learn all about the contents of larder and freezer, and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s ‘ethereal blanquette de veau, sublime risotto with wild mushrooms, juicy magret de canard, spicy Sicilian bouillabaisse’, but nothing at all of what people are saying. The next summer they go to Italy – Martin takes her to an ...”

“... film, in which Emin returns to the sites of the experience, including the hospital, the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, named after one of the most courageous doctors to put women’s bodies at the centre of her concerns (it has since been pulled down to make way for apartments behind Unison’s grand new building on the Euston Road). Emin is very good ...”

“... the awards took place at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.) There, Not Sidney is embraced by Elizabeth Taylor; Sidney Poitier’s friend and rival Harry Belafonte kisses Not Sidney on the cheek. ‘Was I Not Sidney Poitier or was I not Sidney Poitier,’ he wonders, but the distinction’s become meaningless; the ‘special award for Most Dignified ...”

“... your heart and mind have been excited. I must leave that to you,’ Heger told them, as he told Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte’s first biographer, after Charlotte’s death. Heger encouraged the Brontës’ writing, but demanded that they pay attention to their craft. ‘Poet or not … study form,’ he once admonished Charlotte. He often returned their ...”

“... Jim about Sumner, trying to redeem his shameful past, and more than a little of Kurtz in Drax); Elizabeth Gaskell’s only historical novel, Sylvia’s Lovers, set in a whaling community based on Whitby during the Napoleonic Wars; William Golding’s Rites of Passage trilogy (sex and death on a 19th-century merchant vessel); Frankenstein (the scientist and ...”

“... work of the mid-19th-century lunacy commissioners, in particular Samuel Gaskell (brother-in-law of Elizabeth). When he inspected, institutional food was eaten, privies visited, and every patient ...”

“... delivered, each painting was only as good as its subject. Following the Pre-Raphaelite days, when Elizabeth Siddal had to soak in a cold bath for hours to give Ophelia her reality and Millais could only make good his melodrama The Order of Release, 1746 by obtaining a bona fide legal document to paint, the new aestheticism that gained shape in the late 1850s ...”

“... but loyal wives of philandering politicians – Hillary Clinton, Mary Archer, Silda Spitzer, Elizabeth Edwards – or the women married to disgraced or greedy politicians and who follow them into exile. George Bush, however, is intellectually incompetent rather than sexually unfaithful, politically destructive rather than personally dishonest, a failed ...”