“... as Devotion in 1980. And the opposite, I imagine, would be more rhetorically exalted books: Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, of which, not too long ago, I was unable to read two pages, or maybe Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, of which I managed only a little more – even though I had expected to enjoy them both. The ...”

“... French, made the piece a tremendous success. The new King George VI went to see it with Queen Elizabeth shortly after their accession; and a few months later old Queen Mary – a true Aunt Edna type – came, too. That evening a slight hush fell on the house when Rex Harrison described Diana the man-eater as ‘a bitch’, but the old lady laughed ...”

“... to have a complete holiday and no letters will be forwarded.’ (He had gone to join HMS Queen Elizabeth in Greece.) Presumably the Court Circular page did not mention his operation for piles, though the New York Times gave it a multi-deck headline containing the words ‘Dramatist Stricken.’ It would be no surprise, however, to find that Coward formally ...”

“... counterparts in human desire. What would become of literature if Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, Billy Budd and John Claggart, had been able to communicate perfectly from the beginning? Lacan has put it succinctly: ‘There is no sexual relation.’ Which is to say: the sexual relation is literary. This is not to argue that it ...”

“... the museum had been created in the first place, were given their first reassessment. The curator, Elizabeth Aslin, recalled hearing the sound of sledgehammers destroying Victorian tiles and furnishings in one part of the museum as she set but the exhibits in another. The balance of taste had, however, begun to shift for De Morgan the potter. The novelist will ...”

“... Peril incarnate in silent films, did a very good job for a Swede.) Rohmer had a jealous wife, Elizabeth, who threw a great deal of crockery at him, as she proudly revealed in a curious biography written by herself and Coy Van Ash, Master of Villainy (1973). Van Ash repaired the damage by saying that Rohmer’s house in White Plains was ‘the last ...”

“... claim to the title to understand the tensions which were at stake. Already by the reign of Elizabeth I, it was recognised that a university MA made a man a gentleman, whatever his pedigree might be. That is the assumption on which today’s educational system is built: it is choosing the gentlemen (and the ladies also) of the next generation’s social ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... difference between his approach to biographical writing and that of Lytton Strachey:   In Elizabeth and Essex, Lytton Strachey writes of Francis Bacon: ‘an old man, disgraced, shattered, alone, on Highgate Hill, stuffing a dead fowl with snow.’ The story of stuffing the hen with snow is Aubrey’s, and may be read here. Bacon was certainly an old ...”

“... 1901 calls explicitly for the extermination of the ‘unfit’. Even feminist fantasies, such as Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s New Amazonia (1889), felt entitled to exclude those who reveal ‘the slightest trace of disease or malformation’. In view of this background, it comes as less of a shock than it might have been to find a passage from Mein Kampf ...”

“... not run, or were driven out of the race, or have been occluded, by the sheer influence of cash. Elizabeth Dole and Dan Quayle have already withdrawn for this reason, unable to match George W. Bush’s initial and crushing (and for a while, sole) announcement that he had $36 million already acquired from private donors to spend on the acquisition of the ...”

“... desert. The other lunettes do not detain Rowland, although it is likely that Saint Elizabeth, Saint Sebastian, Saint Barbara and so on meant as much to the Pope as Catherine did, and more than the story of Apis (or the Ovidian episodes from the tale of Jupiter and Io, ‘Borgia beef in a feminine key’) on the vault above, which would, in the ...”

“... before his murder’ in 1467, and passed through various hands, including those of Elizabeth I – she can be seen wearing the jewel in the ‘Ermine Portrait’ that hangs in Hatfield House – until it was finally lost in the 19th century. In The Love of Stones, the history of the Three Brethren is told by Katharine Sterne, a young woman who ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... there) and had come to feel some Remains-of-the-Day-like affection for one of his supporters, Lady Elizabeth Lindsay. Nothing came of it. She died of pneumonia early in 1937, and the Prof never loved again. Back on the committee, he seems to have behaved better, even being bracketed with Tizard in R.V. Jones’s account of the completion of the radar chain and ...”