“... an amalgam of genuinely outstanding women and those who merely stand out. There is Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, who is, we are told, ‘engaged to a Peruvian senator’; there is Lili Town-send, who organises ‘human dolphin interactions’ in Florida in between practising spiritual therapy; and there is Dianne Brill, who ‘has created as much of ...”

“... out still. Such stories here – and there are good ones by slightly older writers, such as Elizabeth Jolley, Olga Masters, Judah Waten – bring out something important in the nature of the form. It can carry an immense charge of social implication provided this remains immanent and tacit, visible only in the perspective and depth. Any attempt to make ...”

“... Hardy wrote in 1914 of his feeling ‘that we are living in a more brutal age than that, say, of Elizabeth’, which ‘does not inspire one to write hopeful poetry, or even conjectural prose, but simply make[s] one sit still in an apathy, and watch the clock spinning backwards’. For Henry James, the war seemed ‘to undo everything’: ‘My sense of what ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”