“... which he had never wanted to write, and mislaying the uncompleted manuscript of his life of Elizabeth Tudor. Throughout, his battle-cry was, as this book reminds us, that of Pius IX, Pro Ecclesia Contra Mundum. He had always liked to pop in on the Pope of the day; Beerbohm has a sketch of him giving the Pontiff the date of England’s forthcoming ...”

“... to undertake. Cities and counties were named after him, and children too, until a descendant of Elizabeth Booth, his father’s cousin, disgraced himself in Ford’s Theater in 1865. Cities were also named after Earl Camden, as Pratt later became, and verbal traces of Pratt’s and Mansfield’s judgments on general warrants, or of Blackstone’s commentary ...”

“... cancer. Some of this material was close in spirit to the descriptions of the illness and death of Elizabeth Reegan in The Barracks, and much of it was composed from life. In Memoir it is rewritten word by painful word, so that whole paragraphs from The Leavetaking resurface in fractionally altered forms. This rewriting is in some respects an unsurprising ...”

“... This tradition was established by Emily Dickinson and her followers: H.D., Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Bishop. It is a tradition predominantly, though not exclusively, of women poets; the opposing tradition of ornate or discursive amplitude has been predominantly male (Whitman, Crane, Pound, Eliot, Ginsberg). Wariness and rigour characterise this genus ...”

“... about as if it always meant the same thing. William of Orange was a constitutional monarch; so is Elizabeth II. The powers, rights, and obligations accruing to each are, of course, very different. Even written constitutions are subject to different interpretations at different times (as the extension of the franchise in the US to African Americans and women ...”

“... leisure in which to pursue them, thanks to a family fortune founded on manufacturing gunpowder for Elizabeth I. He had spent most of the Civil War period and its aftermath touring France, Italy and the Netherlands, where he acquired an excellent knowledge of European art and architecture; and much of his later life was devoted to introducing Continental high ...”

“... A busy time in the courts brought a modest prosperity, a house in the suburbs and a partner, Elizabeth Darbyshire, whom he later married. Politics never lost its appeal, however. Radical movements were split over the degree of accommodation that should be reached with the progressive end of the mainstream. Jones favoured reconciliation with the John ...”

“... onwards, the Sparta we have is constructed from Athenian sources and those influenced by them. As Elizabeth Rawson noted in The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (1969), ‘the bewilderingly contradictory attitudes taken to Sparta in post-classical times can only be understood when it is seen how contradictory the ancient sources are too.’ Pomeroy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of novels) is historical in much the same way that Gone with the Wind and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex are historical. It takes a familiar time, draws a horizontal line along an axis, and marks it out with peak events everyone has heard of, weighting them with their most commonplace interpretations. This is then used as a moving backdrop in ...”

“... Strong immediately broke with the poster for his first major exhibition, The Winter Queen, about Elizabeth of Bohemia. That was in 1963, his ‘annus mirabilis’, and the next year saw another breakthrough when David Piper became director of the Portrait Gallery and allowed Strong free rein. He now had ‘a super job’, as he confided to a friend: ‘new ...”

“... of the translations are by Weinberger himself, but there are also versions of individual poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Tomlinson. In the notes Weinberger has glossed allusions, and brought together, as my quotations have suggested, an illuminating set of comments by Paz himself. Paz’s recurring ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”