“... SNP, instigated the legal proceedings – MacCormick v. Lord Advocate – which for the first time drew the attention of the judiciary to the latent anomalies lurking in the British constitution. In what is also known as the royal numerals case, MacCormick complained, naturally enough, that the new queen, Elizabeth II, was ...”

“... as those who have discerned this rebellion contriving from (if not before) the death of Queen Elizabeth’. One wonders what he would have made of Stone’s lectures, in which we were taken back to the reign of Henry VIII, and learned as much about population movements and the educational system as about religion and politics. It was the total history of ...”

“... encounter in St Luke’s Gospel between the expectant Virgin Mary and her sixty-year-old cousin Elizabeth, improbably pregnant, in the days before IVF, with John the Baptist. The Visitation is the Second Joyful Mystery of the rosary. For those who grew up in Catholic Ireland, it was also a cautionary tale: if it happened to them, it could happen to ...”

“... of colour and texture was accompanied by huge stamina and salty humour. For her farewell card they drew a cartoon of Spry galloping along with neatly permed hair and showing a lot of leg, while a drooping dahlia carries her bags and an exhausted bee salutes. The verses inside, ‘to be sung in a rollicking manner but with a haunted ...”

“... around his polka-dotted legs. Merchant ship owners could name their vessels however they liked and drew on an astonishing range of references for their decorations. The merchant figureheads collection in the Cutty Sark gallery – assembled in the first half of the 20th century by Sydney Cumbers, a marine-obsessed businessman nicknamed ‘Long John ...”

“... that have been made, though useful, have been limited in scope and achievement. J. Jean Hecht drew heavily on printed manuals, memoirs and correspondence and focused on servants in atypical great houses; Bridget Hill set out to broaden our understanding of service in smaller households, but also relied heavily on printed sources. Tim Meldrum’s ...”

“... Diana’s dresses, exhibited at Kensington Palace more than twenty years after her death, still drew the crowds. Last year Prince Charles came higher than David Gandy and David Beckham in GQ’s rankings for best-dressed Briton. The queen has been a global celebrity longer than anyone anywhere.The contract between the royal family and the nation thus ...”

“... midnight. Raining as we returned to the hotel. On the way stopped at a nearby Visa cashpoint and drew out 1000 francs as though by magic in sixty seconds. Monday 31: Driven by Bruce van Barthold up to his little but charming (banal but inevitable adjective) apartment in the 19th arrondissement to lunch with his wife Jo and their two-week-old infant ...”

“... on themselves: do I matter? It is a reaction to the totality presented in the poems. This is what Elizabeth Hardwick heard in Plath’s 1962 BBC recordings, and we must trust the diamond-hardness of Hardwick’s ear, sending out its ray like Marco’s stickpin in The Bell Jar: I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath reading. It was not anything like I could have ...”

“... flying drapery, mobile seminudity, but no blood, no dirt, no gracelessness. The artists who drew Isadora from life seem to be pursuing the ideal into this century, as if they viewed her new propositions for the dance with recognition, not surprise – as if, in fact, both she and they were continuing something that had already begun. In all the ...”

“... heaven’; he is quite ‘drunk’ with it. Walter Raleigh pined like a spurned lover when Elizabeth I turned her attentions to the Earl of Essex. George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more affection than between lovers in the best kind’. Lucy Hughes-Hallett wonders, in her biography of ...”

“... Labour’s radicalism in this area was to be properly celebrated as such (not least because this drew attention away from the new government’s timid adherence to Conservative spending limits). Nor was devolution ostensibly about partisan advantage. The new parliament was set up on the additional member model of proportional representation, with voters ...”

“... to fire up a dinner party. I don’t fully understand the sources of Mencken’s anger, and Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, though she has written a balanced and formidably well-informed biography, does little to elucidate them. ‘Infancy, that nonage Mencken defined as the larval stage of his life, began for him on 12 September 1880,’ she tells us. ‘Of his ...”

“... level, Mansfield’s was a model career and Samuel Smiles wrote of him with reverence. His wife, Elizabeth, to whom he was devotedly married for 46 years, was the daughter of an earl and the granddaughter of a lord chancellor. A dutiful but not excessively devout Anglican, he prospered at the bar, then entered Parliament and almost at once was appointed ...”

“... woman?’ (emphasis on the question mark). Then he shifts to the deck of the merchant ship Elizabeth, en route from Livorno to New York City in 1850, whose passengers included the 40-year-old Fuller, ‘in a white nightgown, your hair fallen long’, with her young Italian lover (to whom she may or may not have been married) and their one-year-old ...”