“... King’s has a tradition of involvement with the Secret Service: Sir Francis Walsingham ran it for Elizabeth I.) Today the hounds are in pursuit of Andrew Gow, the Classical scholar and art collector who was Blunt’s mentor at Trinity. Gow, who had taught at Eton, devoted part of his life to editing Nicander, a didactic Greek poet who wrote poems on ...”

“... Nast out to become Vogue’s biggest shareholder, but New York retained editorial control, and Elizabeth Penrose, Nast’s protégée (and likely mistress) was sent to clear away the clichés. Brogue, she discovered, was ‘excessively sprightly’ and in need of American rigour. She didn’t like having to pay Evelyn Waugh 20 guineas an article either ...”

“... physicians and scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries – prominent among them Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, John Banister, as well as Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby and Robert Boyle. Mummy continued to be dispensed well into the 18th century, when Robert James’s Pharmacopeia Universalis (1747) advised: Mummy resolves coagulated Blood, and is ...”

“... which took shape rapidly and was published in 1970, winning praise from William Trevor and Elizabeth Bowen. ‘If I had bothered to look at [my] diary,’ he noted two months after its publication, ‘I wd also have used the “flight of stone steps leading up into thin air”, which I simply forgot.’ He had added a detail to his version of the ...”

“... is literal. The poem is unlikely, for instance, to be directed to ‘my sovereign’, Queen Elizabeth I, or to a contemporary slave-runner, though the words say ‘Being your slave’. The Sonnets launch us far and fast into the kingdom of metaphor, where life is real but not a statistic. To give one instance: the lines express the kind of detached ...”

“... to Ireland they had to buy their big house. There was no Bowen’s Court to write a history of, as Elizabeth Bowen did. They made up for this shortcoming with an unquestioned loyalty to the empire and a cult of the stiff upper lip. The two were inextricably entwined, as Keane acknowledged in an interview when Good Behaviour came out:Mother’s father governed ...”

“... year later, which cost the lives of around ten thousand men for nothing, but which a furious Queen Elizabeth ensured was hushed up.What is incontestable is that over the years the British navy really did achieve the mastery of the seas of which it had so long boasted. With new financial resilience, it began to grasp the techniques that made it possible to keep ...”

“... woman … In the characterisation of women, the male novelists of those years wrote as though Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothea Brooke, Becky Sharp and Emma Bovary had never been created.She describes Phuong, Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress in Greene’s The Quiet American – a novel that invokes Cyril Connolly’s dictum in Enemies of Promise about the pram in ...”

“... Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he have nominated? Orwell, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett? Or conceivably ... himself? Waugh has even proved exportable to America: Brideshead Revisited was the most popular series ever shown on American public-service television. Still, his former admirer Edmund Wilson was revolted ...”

“... Oxford. His Lemprière ancestors included a lieutenant bailiff of Jersey during the reign of Elizabeth, and a governor of the island under Oliver Cromwell. John was a teenage prodigy who entered Pembroke in 1785 and completed his dictionary at the age of 23, during a year spent as assistant master at Reading School under another Jersey man, Richard ...”

“... celebrated with a holiday in Ireland, the highlight of which was a happy fortnight as guests of Elizabeth Bowen at Bowen’s Court. Returning to England in July, they briefly rented a house in Charleston, but soon moved to another rented house, Lovells Farm, in Marnhull, Dorset – Hardy’s Marlot – where Ramsbotham worked on a novel while Reed reviewed ...”

“... he was quietly retired soon afterwards. I once discussed Allenby’s Egyptian career with the late Elizabeth Monroe, a keen-spirited exponent of the liberal imperialist ‘Chatham House version’ of modern Middle Eastern history. I had professed myself shocked by the crass brutality of Allenby’s response to the Stack assassination. Miss Monroe urged a more ...”

“... to racier works like Simon Forman’s Autobiography or the lives of unknowns like Mary Pennington, Elizabeth Stirredge or Captain Roger Clap. Literary evidence is almost totally absent. The Shepherd in The Winter’s Tale says: ‘I would there were no age between ten and three-and twenty ... for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with ...”

“... the present day.’ Or again, ‘a same-sex coterie may well have flourished at the court of Queen Elizabeth, around the Earl of Southampton, and may have involved a same-sex identity recognisably continuous with that experienced by some men today.’ The queer who emerges at the end of the 19th century may be a new composite but he quickly takes his place ...”

“... and left a million pounds to his heir, who became the first Lord Melbourne and married Elizabeth Milbanke, Byron’s friend and confidante. Dr Johnson’s opinion that the main motive for making money was to found a landed family was widely if not universally shared, and with it went the view that it was necessary for peers and baronets to possess ...”