“... own polite loathing of her grand yet self-absorbed mother. In the mordantly sapphic novels of Elizabeth Bowen, older women are depicted as seductive and treacherous – enchanting sociopaths who leave the younger women who fall in love with them both shell-shocked and vengeful. (See in particular Bowen’s brilliant first novel, The Hotel, of 1927.) In ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Darcy’s income can hardly be untainted by slavery. But emerging from his pond and confronting Elizabeth, the TV Darcy, clad only, and by his own choice, in a fetching shirt, is exempt from that description, unless the scriptwriter can be said to have commodified him. The Austens, though not rich themselves, had connections in the world of London ...”

“... Its own story is about a young magic-working Florentine who steals a letter of introduction from Elizabeth I to the Great Mughal and turns up at his court. He claims to be the mughal’s uncle, and to have been born of the enchantingly beautiful Qara Köz, a member of the royal family who was lost during a war almost a century before, and who because she ...”

“... than a million, at the age of 91. And the oldest person in Britain was also among the richest. Elizabeth Ramsden died in 1817, worth £140,000, at the age of 106. The average age at death of the whole adult population was probably 50 at most. In Britain 200 years ago, the more you got the longer you lived; and the longer you lived the more you got. This ...”

“... scholars have explored the emotional costs of imperialism, and what books there are – notably Elizabeth Buettner’s Empire Families – have tended to focus on British family life in colonial India. But in the 18th-century British Empire, the dialectic of imperial opportunity and separation pulled most insistently across the Atlantic – ‘a world in ...”

“... and Kelley loves a ‘battle with the waistband’, something that gave her hours of fun with Elizabeth Taylor. But her place in the sun came with His Way: The Unauthorised Biography of Frank Sinatra, which raised Sinatra’s hoodlum status to the point where she was sued for two million dollars. Sinatra dropped the action, and Kelley’s book went to ...”

“... paintbrush-thick eyelashes. These, though, were a very dark brown. (‘They’re like those of Elizabeth Taylor,’ I thought. ‘Or maybe Montgomery Clift.’) His eyes, too, were very dark – but a very dark green. He was, moreover, articulate – speaking in full, proper sentences and using no, like, you know, ‘discourse markers’. Although born and ...”

“... prose is alive with doubts, speculations, lapses in memory. It is a breathing, flawed thing. In Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928), Lytton Strachey collapsed this passage into an unforgettable final vignette of Francis Bacon: ‘an old man, disgraced, shattered, alone, on Highgate Hill, stuffing a dead fowl with snow’. Strachey, serenely ...”

“... celebrations (as well as Walcott and Livingstone, the list includes Ben Okri, Michèle Roberts, Elizabeth Cook, Iain Sinclair, Tom Raworth and Irvine Welsh), the administrators told me ‘family fun’ was to be the mood. So instead, would I give a talk about The Wobbly Tooth, a little children’s book I wrote thirty years ago when my son Conrad lost his ...”

“... cast: spiteful, domineering Mrs Schwellenberg, who plays Lady Catherine de Bourgh to Burney’s Elizabeth; tremulous, inconsolable Miss Port (‘her poor swelling Heart’), whose name, it turns out, is Marianne; and a procession of sentimental military men, all melting at the poems of Cowper, which they mine for chat-up lines. The difficulties posed by ...”

“... a shipwreck, exquisite and ancient, dredged up from the deep. ‘It is a bit depressing for me,’ Elizabeth Young wrote in Pandora’s Handbag, the collection of her journalism published just after her death in 2001, ‘that Welsh’s household-name stardom rests on a film. Books alone can’t cut it any more, it would seem.’ Liz and I were book-reviewing ...”

“... of past existence set our imaginations running – the quick in the pursuit of the dead, to borrow Elizabeth Hardwick’s description of biography.In their introduction to Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love 1850s-1950s (Five Continents, £52), Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell note that their collection came about accidentally, when twenty years ago they ...”

“... sectarian warfare. History exemplified the moral. Henry VIII dismantled the ancient religion and Elizabeth I prudently reached a via media which avoided the ferocious religious wars of France and Scotland. James I foolishly drew religion back into statecraft and Charles I so intensified the problem that a civil war of religion and a breakdown in political ...”

“... famous trio of this time, William Cavendish, fifth Duke of Devonshire, his wife Georgiana and Lady Elizabeth Foster, concealed their goings-on and their miscellaneous progeny in the grand seclusion of Chatsworth and Devonshire House. Less socially-exalted, the Hamiltons and Nelson were at once more notorious and far more vulnerable. All three were outsiders of ...”