“... not to settle old scores. There will never be a comprehensive or detailed history of Curtis Brown Ltd because the firm, like most discreet literary agencies, doesn’t preserve its records – at least not for the historian. All the more reason that one might hope for some first-hand testimony from Watson. What he provides us is, largely, trivia: such ...”

“... into her mouth. Jumper cables hooked up to a battery are clipped to both breasts, turning them brown. I had been dropping lit matches from Le Relais onto her belly and Elizabeth, delirious and probably overdosing on the Ecstasy, had been helping before I turned on her and chewed at one of her nipples until I couldn’t ...”

“... ruler still presented an imaginative challenge to her subjects. In a poem on the wedding, even Elizabeth Barrett worked to subsume the queen in the woman: ‘Esteem that wedded hand less dear for sceptre than for ring,/And hold her uncrowned womanhood to be the royal thing.’ Landseer’s Windsor Castle in Modern Times, painted the following ...”

“... to an heiress for four years in order to travel the world, which he could not ask a wife to do. Elizabeth Longford, in her introduction, describes this as a characteristic blend of ‘cold calculation and sensitive consideration’. The book consists of extracts from Curzon’s Tales of Travel, Russia in Central Asia and Leaves from a Viceroy’s Notebook ...”

“... by the nationalist politician John MacCormick against the assumption by the new queen of the style Elizabeth II – though she was patently the first monarch by the name of Elizabeth to reign over the post-1707 United Kingdom. Although Cooper found that MacCormick had no standing to bring the case and that the queen’s ...”

“... process and not so simple larceny. Between process and, oh – just ‘write it!’ (to quote Elizabeth Bishop) – plagiarism. The answer, by way of explanation for which I offer the following narrative (or confession), is ‘no.’ Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that all such confessions are deceptive. To quote J.D. Salinger ...”

“... Presbyterianism to the freedoms of continental Europe. Married to an attractive but unstable man, Elizabeth Shand is told by her cosmopolitan sister-in-law, Elise, that ‘You and I, Elizabeth, would make one damned fine woman between us.’ The two end up running off to the Continent together, though whether their ...”

“... the offing, in the shape of Doris Kilman, history teacher and constant companion to her daughter, Elizabeth. Elizabeth, it seems, doesn’t care for anything very much apart from her dog, Grizzle. The whole house stinks of the tar used to treat the animal’s distemper. ‘Still, better poor Grizzle,’ Clarissa ...”

“... only around eighty American novels had been published, and the best known was Charles Brockden Brown’s macabre Edgar Huntley (1799), although Washington Irving’s collection of short stories and vignettes, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., would prove immensely popular the year Smith made his jibe. (Like Cooper after him, Irving had taken up ...”

“... a cleaning lady called Mrs Bacon, a News of the World reader who gossiped about suicide and ‘cut brown bread so thinly that its fibres had to be bonded by slabs of butter’. In the school holidays he was sent to stay with various uncles and aunts (‘Uncle Hank and Uncle Wangle … Uncle Cecil, pharmacist. Wife: Auntie Rae. Uncle Edgar, dislikable ...”

“... In England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the ...”

“... of the populace, must remember, that their insolence in peace is bravery in war.’ Hurrah! As Elizabeth Einberg puts it, The March of the Guards to Finchley is ‘a work that aims to be both “serious and comic” in the fullest Hogarthian sense’. However reprehensible the behaviour of the grenadiers, the painting permits us to enjoy their ...”

“... the demands of miniature painting – that only the dedicated would wish to copy it. Ford Madox Brown used it in Christ Washing Peter’s Feet: ‘painted in four months,’ he tells us, ‘the flesh painted on wet white at Millais’s lying instigation; Roberson’s medium, which I think dangerous like Millais’s advice’. Millais, Holman Hunt and ...”

“... who had curtsied to Victoria. Yet the girls who grew up wearing ‘princess coats’ like Elizabeth and Margaret’s emerged from the season into a very different world and several came out not as swans but as viragos. Among MacCarthy’s near contemporaries at the Palace were Vanessa Redgrave, Rose Dugdale and Teresa ‘Hayter of the ...”

“... on the Soviet Union’.* In 2009 the Ministry of Defence commissioned Lieutenant General Chris Brown to carry out a review of British strategy, later released under the Freedom of Information Act as the ‘Operation Telic Lessons Compendium’. Brown concluded that the army hadn’t been prepared for the occupation, and ...”