“... 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 ...”

“... her as sovereign lady (domina) of his own Continental lands and even himself.During the reign of Elizabeth I, tales emerged of Eleanor the murderess. Holinshed, followed by Shakespeare, implies that she was complicit with King John in killing John’s nephew Arthur of Brittany, the son of his brother Geoffrey, who had a superior claim to the ...”

“... to make sense.Le Guin takes her cue from Woman’s Creation (1975), a book by the anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher, which argues that early humans survived mostly by foraging and gathering rather than hunting. From this Le Guin develops her ‘carrier bag theory of evolution’, putting forward the idea that the first cultural device was probably a container ...”

“... 1972 film The Death of Maria Malibran (Warhol encouraged her to take the part). Then came the full Elizabeth Taylor treatment, furs, premieres, restaurants (Darling was a traditionalist: ‘Restaurants should have carpets on the floor, upholstered seats and be dark’). She wasn’t interested in miniskirts: her idea of womanhood was embodied by Veronica ...”

“... Lee and Fraser show – from the rainbow Christ sits on in Memling’s Last Judgment and the one Elizabeth I holds in Isaac Oliver’s Rainbow Portrait to those in the sign outside the Rainbow Motel or round a tunnel entrance north of San Francisco (more than one culture has believed that if you go through the rainbow arch your sex changes) – suggest that ...”

“... the students’ rooms. My mother, one of those ‘girls’, changed her name from Violet Maud to Elizabeth and ran away to make a better life. Her sister Ivy stayed on and had a painfully limited existence. (The family was addicted to floral names: a third daughter, Daisy, got herself pregnant and was shipped off to Australia, never, as far as I know, to be ...”

“... period, a chest-flattening corset, known as a ‘pair of bodies’, was popular among elite women (Elizabeth I’s funeral effigy in 1603 wore bodies in fustian and leather); in the 18th century, stiff, whalebone-based stays were introduced, designed to shrink the waist and elevate the bosom. The Rijksmuseum has a rigid-looking example in scarlet embroidered ...”

“... is an establishment Democratic centrist who has never been an icon of the progressive left like Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. ‘Dumb as a rock’ and ‘low IQ’ – he may be the last person on earth who mentions IQ – had no traction, considering that the stars of MAGA include the congresswomen Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor ...”

“... of now mostly forgotten ‘English Sapphos’: early 19th-century female poets such as Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Caroline Norton, whose kitsch set-pieces on the theme of Sappho’s suicide (‘The Last Song of Sappho’, ‘The Picture of Sappho’ etc) at once confirmed Sappho’s heroic status as originary ‘Poetess’ and sent her – repeatedly ...”

“... lead to good and bad outcomes. The latter possibility was given the name ‘consequentialism’ by Elizabeth Anscombe, and its best-known version is utilitarianism. The opposite view, that the right is at least in some respects independent of the good, doesn’t have a name, but the principles that it identifies are usually called ‘deontological’ – an ...”

“... treated as freakish androgynes, like Maesia who defended herself in the Forum. The obvious case is Elizabeth I’s belligerent address to the troops at Tilbury in 1588 in the face of the Spanish Armada.10 In the words many of us learned at school, she seems positively to avow her own androgyny: ‘I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the ...”

“... to Austin, and, to a lesser extent, her sister, Lavinia; her love of the Book of Revelation, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontës, George Eliot and a sentimental writer who went by the name of Ik Marvel; her passionate friendship with Susan Gilbert Dickinson, whom Austin married after a difficult courtship and who thereafter lived next door to ...”