“... 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 ...”

“... we never know. But his next step was to enter into a contract of marriage with his ward, Elizabeth Lady Lisle, whose title he had taken. Elizabeth was only eight but she was an heiress and the move took her off the market till she grew up, giving Charles the use of her resources. As long as the marriage was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... what James conveys himself. As you might expect, Browning loves ‘and’. Here he is writing to Elizabeth Barrett about the splendours of the Dulwich Picture Gallery: ‘those two Guidos, the wonderful Rembrandt of Jacob’s vision, such a Watteau, the triumphant three Murillo pictures, a Giorgione music-lesson group, all the Poussins with the ...”

“... battle.’ Uncle Ernest’s son Hartley came with his wife Jean and their children, Mark (14) and Elizabeth (10). Hartley hated hospitals, hence his demand for full family back-up. He was actually surprised that Mark had condescended to come: a big 14, Mark had long since passed beyond parental control and only appeared with the family on state occasions. The ...”

“... and the incarnationalist and Christian-socialist teachings of Lamennais and Frederick Maurice). Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh (1857) dismissed Comte’s doctrines as intrinsically ‘absurd’; yet the poem centred on the heroic tragedy of a man who practised the supreme positivist virtue of ‘altruism’ or ‘sacrifice for others’, at the ...”

“... encased in this particular rather pleasing little casket of flesh’ – and again with a poem by Elizabeth Bishop about a similar experience just before her seventh birthday. I suspect that many children have experienced with amazement the realisation that the self with which they are so familiar inhabits a particular public human being. The book is packed ...”

“... efforts. National camaraderie was bolstered by making important figures seem ordinary – Princess Elizabeth in her ATS uniform stripping down an engine – while ordinary people were made heroic. The fire-watcher and the air-raid warden appeared on posters picked out in silhouette as guardian angels haloed by a night sky full of fire and searchlights. Women ...”

“... ladder, not a valediction; its last three holders – Chris Grayling, Michael Gove and now Elizabeth Truss – have had no legal training. When she took her oath of office, Truss promised to ‘respect the rule of law’ and to ‘defend the independence of the judiciary’. The Constitutional Reform Act 2005 places her under a statutory duty to do ...”

“... Impostors (1910) included chapters on royal pretenders, pages of wild speculation that Queen Elizabeth I was in fact a boy from the town of Bisley, and a chapter on women who masqueraded as men, including a subset whom Stoker deemed the most implausible impostors of all: women who masqueraded as military men. The tyrannical army surgeon Dr James Barry ...”

“... resilient. He lived to be eighty, having served four monarchs (Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I) and spent 43 years as a member of the Chapel Royal. Unfortunately for historians, his music and his longevity are all we have to go on, since Tallis left almost nothing about himself. Unlike William Byrd and John Sheppard, he wrote no letters that ...”

“... children about, or sell to them, rather than simply give.Lilibet II’s great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon could get very caught up in the swooshiness of poetry. She loved going fishing with Ted Hughes. In the long boring afternoons in the Highlands, the hours between kippers and drinkies, poor Ted would take her down to the river and start ...”

“... bedchamber ornament – or the ‘three pictures of Death in black frames’ that surrounded Elizabeth Dugdale, a widow from Coventry, as she settled down to sleep. The bedstead might be decorated with the names of family members, or with iconography appropriate to the bed’s role as ‘the practical and symbolic heart of the household and indeed of ...”