“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... him with the right kind of dialogue on request. She was apparently not an infallible folklorist: Elizabeth Coxhead, editor of the modern edition of Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, notes that ‘some of the tales may have been bowdlerised for her ear, and the wicked landlord, who loomed large in peasant experience, is notably absent ...”

“... then wife, Barbara, and an editor at Harper’s, Robert Silvers, plus Robert Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, Epstein launched the New York Review of Books. Like Anchor Books (and everything Epstein has invested himself in), the New York Review made a conscious attempt to raise the intellectual tone of American cultural life (to raise it, at ...”

“... suffered a shortage of torturers when they were needed, men who don’t even have the excuse of Elizabeth I or Calvin that to diminish the horror of the punishment was somehow to condone or even share in the offence. Sometimes ecclesiastical authorities, in milder mood, asked only for public penance, but up to about 1700 there was a preference for judicial ...”

“... of famous names – encounters with Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Assia Wevill, George Barker and Elizabeth Smart are described, sometimes with an almost embarrassing degree of openness – it takes an effort of will to remember that what is described actually happened. This odd effect makes more sense if you see it as an attempt on Weldon’s part to ...”

“... the dirt, and spat, Turning away abruptly, out of respect. Justice was not prolific; like Elizabeth Bishop, with whom he has much in common, he devoted his life to the perfection of a small body of deceptively modest poems. His work exhibits little of the ostentatious virtuosity of better-known formalists such as Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, with ...”

“... in temperature in the box. The Accumulator that Reich gave Neill arrived in England on the Queen Elizabeth in April 1947, along with a smaller ‘shooter’ for healing wounds: ‘I use the box daily and read your books in it,’ Neill wrote appreciatively. Neill soon became convinced of the machine’s effectiveness: ‘We used the small Accu on a girl of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have ‘been chopped up’. The oddness and severe limits of this artistic education, which Elizabeth Prettejohn emphasises in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of Burne-Jones’s work at Tate Britain (until 24 February), is even more striking when you consider that Rossetti, despite having spent several years first at Sass’s Drawing School ...”

“... In June 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited Washington. Although the White House had had air-conditioning installed in its offices ten years earlier, family and guest rooms weren’t artificially cooled. Despite this, the King and Queen requested hot-water bottles, heavy-duty bedding and glasses of hot milk before bedtime ...”

“... Aristotelian view, as formal prohibitions on interest were gradually overturned. In 1571, Queen Elizabeth repealed English anti-usury provisions, setting a maximum rate of 10 per cent. Excessive charges on borrowers were to be avoided only when they represented a grossly unjust theft from the disadvantaged; otherwise, the use of interest-bearing loans was ...”

“... as the refuge of ‘many a psychological misfit and lonely crank’ – despite the fact that Elizabeth II and Winston Churchill were both inducted as druids.Stone Circles takes a balanced approach, appreciating Stukeley’s contribution to the scientific as well as the mythic. Having trained as a doctor, he transferred his skills from anatomy to field ...”