“... description more generally. Sometimes Doty describes a work of art (Murano glass, a watercolour by Elizabeth Bishop), sometimes an ordinary object (a second-hand kimono, a crab shell), sometimes a part of the natural world (beaches, horses, dogs), sometimes a man-made scene (gardens, harbours, Times Square). He recognises how fond of description he is, and ...”

“... with many opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since ...”

“... tragedy. Ibsen’s great female roles helped a new generation of actors to emerge, including Elizabeth Robins in England, Eleanora Duse in Italy and Eva Le Gallienne in the United States. Even the ageing superstar Sarah Bernhardt appeared in Lady from the Sea in 1906. Meanwhile another set of directors and actors turned to Ibsen for quite different ...”

“... confirmed that it provided no ‘automaticity’. Blair didn’t want to hear about any of this. Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the deputy Foreign Office legal adviser, resigned; her boss, Michael Wood, stoically remained in place and subsequently received a knighthood. Unusually, the holders of the Oxbridge chairs in international law, James Crawford and Vaughan ...”

“... Historically, he has appealed much more strongly to poets than to scholars or critics: Southey, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves and Auden were all enthusiasts. It was Southey’s endorsement that inspired Alexander Dyce to produced the first scholarly edition in 1843, and that remained the only source for academic study until John ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... focus on people, or to understand much about them. Here’s one example from The Pocket. In 1770 Elizabeth Warner, an unmarried servant, was charged with murdering her newborn daughter. Her afterbirth was concealed in a leather pocket, and her dead baby wrapped in some underclothes. Having informed us of this, the authors move on: you have to flip to an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... embattled, both having to extricate themselves from marriages (Lowell’s seismic separation from Elizabeth Hardwick, his wife of more than twenty years, is recounted in The Dolphin Letters). But it was his illness and Blackwood’s alcoholism that were responsible for the domestic chaos that marked their time together: him in and out of psychiatric ...”

“... 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 ...”