“... the case of a Foreign Office official who did resign over Iraq. In a memo dated 18 March 2003 Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the Foreign Office’s deputy legal adviser, who had been in the diplomatic service for 29 years, told her superiors that using force against Iraq without a second UN Security Council resolution would be illegal. ‘I cannot in conscience go ...”

“... today the site of St Paul’s Cathedral) was rebuilt, and decorated with life-size statues of Elizabeth I and Lud. Here was a London anchored to a past that was demonstrably not Roman. (At the risk of causing disappointment, it ought to be added that the most likely origin of ‘Ludgate’ is the Old English hlid-geat: ‘postern’ or ...”

“... separates from her amicably and sends her back to England, where she becomes the Virgin Queen Elizabeth. Now we know that one of Philip’s four wives was English, but this was Mary Tudor. Moreover, a constant theme of the novel is that el Señor has no heir, and indeed dies heirless. Obviously Charles V had an heir, Philip II, and so did the historical ...”

“... even necessarily to politeness.’ A notable debate took place in 1948 in the Socratic Club, when Elizabeth Anscombe – represented by Wilson as being as tough and unscrupulous in argument as Lewis himself – ‘thoroughly trounced’ him in argument, and showed up his inadequacy as a philosopher. This occasion seems to have had an extravagant effect on ...”

“... for us: ‘Remember – the truth always sounds incredible ... don’t forget that everything Elizabeth [the dead woman] told people was true, and that was why nobody believed her.’ The devils here are entirely grammatical, can’t be caught out, and beyond grammar there is only silence or the unheard stories of women. There is a recurring act in the ...”

“... is the connection between Ruskin’s hatred of orchids and his views on Darwin? Why did he praise Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and not George Eliot?), that we need to focus more accurately. We get precious little of that kind of definition from Kemp. Instead, we are presented with a tiring stream of second-hand generalisations. One of the consequences of ...”

“... ought to like them. Stylistically, Seeing things is plain as plain, sometimes ‘awful plain’ (Elizabeth Bishop, ‘The Moose’). The gutturals of early Heaney are long gone, and now also the suave Latinity – or Latin suavity – of what one can now call his mid-period. The poems have the most pedestrian beginnings, often stumbling over themselves, with ...”

“... Ludgate, where Wyatt’s rebels were repelled. It was in London that Mary died and that her sister Elizabeth was fêted and crowned. But London was also the most volatile and influential of the many local communities which made up Early Modern England, as well as by far the richest and most populous. The history of the 16th-century religious changes in London ...”

“... first-night party without inviting a single member of the cast, an achievement for which his wife Elizabeth offered to nominate him to the Guinness Book of Records. One remark I feel obliged to challenge concerns both my parents. Lilli Palmer, Wapshott alleges, ‘always said’ that her husband was homosexual. I am amply familiar with what my mother ...”

“... Austen, and posed New Age questions on the courtship rituals of Pride and Prejudice: ‘Suppose Elizabeth Bennet said to her parents: “I’ve found a life partner I really love, and she’s a woman”?’ Though I had asked for a modern hotel, with a telly and a minibar, my hosts were sure that I would enjoy The Morning Glory, a local guest house near the ...”

“... six entries, one a mere pastiche of Churchillian rhetoric. Churchill himself gets three, Queen Elizabeth I three. Auberon Waugh gets a place, next to Art Buchwald who gets one for the quip ‘Old soldiers never die – they just write their memoirs.’ A 16th-century Grand Inquisitor, in a different vein of seriousness, is in for: ‘When a man speaks the ...”

“... no one represented in this book is – and very funny about women’s insistence on the human; Elizabeth Taylor on Ivy Compton-Burnett (1951), remarking that her heroine’s bi-nominal titles can make reading a solicitor on ‘Landlords and Tenants’ an exciting prospect. Infected as one is bound to be by the style of a writer that one admires enough to ...”

“... of pointless visitings. Dorothy Shakespear, one sometimes feels, was not much less imprisoned than Elizabeth Barrett had been, and in not much less need of a poet-errant to liberate her. Neither the captive nor her would-be liberator wasted much time complaining: these were the rules of the game, and the two of them could only be patient. Patience is not what ...”

“... most, saying she showed ‘amiability verging on weakness’. He and his new and pregnant wife, Elizabeth, were in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion. Their house was damaged in the fighting, though more by the efforts of amateur firefighters than by the rebels. At one point a messenger he tried to send out of the city was crucified by the Boxers: Henry told ...”

“... have been avoided if anyone had been paying attention, and reconnects with a college friend called Elizabeth ‘Libby’ Slater who is tasked, somewhat improbably, with narrating the novel from his perspective. Libby starts coming into Manhattan from her home in New Jersey to hang around Toby and hear about his divorce. Her own marriage is stable and ...”