“... 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 ...”

“... ways.’ Keeler may or may not have been the most moral woman of the 1960s (my vote would go to Elizabeth Taylor for her belief in the sacred bond of marriages), but the looseness of her definitions is problematical for someone claiming to offer the whole truth. Apart from the moral issue, her assertion that she was never a prostitute is important for her ...”

“... In 1852, Elizabeth Barrett Browning met the expatriate American actress Charlotte Cushman (famous for her trouser roles) and her companion Matilda Hays, a writer and feminist. They had ‘made vows of celibacy and of eternal attachment to each other – they live together, dress alike,’ Barrett Browning wrote to her sister ...”

“... private library in England in his house in Mortlake (his diary records regular visits from Queen Elizabeth, as well as promises of money from her). We tend now to see him not as the magus who turns base metals into gold in the course of Crowley’s tetralogy, but as a kind of knowledge broker who sold his learning to aid historical research and pragmatic ...”

“... writers – the non-Li. It seems she is most drawn to Irish and Russian writers: William Trevor, Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern; Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gorky, though her pantheon is unpredictable and expands to take in Hardy and Mansfield, some oddly straightforward passages from the letters of Philip Larkin or the conundrum that is Marianne Moore (and ...”

“... to a standard-issue inter-poet wadding of references to Archimedes, Bismarck, the Bible, Elizabeth Bishop, classical mythology, Coltrane, Einstein, Freud, King Lear, Marie Antoinette, Picasso, Puccini, Ramesses, Van Gogh and so forth. (One of the pleasures of earlier Lleshanaku, you realise wistfully, is the absence of such things, in the way that ...”