“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”