“... as a metaphysical doctrine, it was designed to stabilise both state and monarchy. As set out in Elizabeth I’s reign it decreed that The King has in him two Bodies, viz, a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities … But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or ...”

“... shadow club’ where Johnson could spar at leisure with other intellectual women: Frances Burney, Elizabeth Montagu, Hannah More. Johnson had his own room at Streatham Place, and wrote most of Lives of the Poets there, reading manuscript sections aloud to those present much as Samuel Richardson had read draft novels to his ‘female senate’ thirty years ...”

“... the 1990s we would have called them cruise missiles; these days, we’d call them suicide drones. (Elizabeth Bowen did refer to them at the time as ‘droning things’.) It wasn’t just London. My mother, then a six-year-old child in Essex, remembers hearing their distinctive putt-putt overhead. She learned that when the engine cut out, the V-1 began its ...”

“... old man in a lace collar and black cap’, as they see him, a relic of ‘the England of Queen Elizabeth’. From Cambridge, Massachusetts, the regicides move on to New Haven but, fearing for their safety in the town, they set up camp a few miles away in a cave concealed by giant rocks. Whalley and Goffe hear ‘the forest settling down for the night, the ...”

“... Keys – but as he started to film 92 in the Shade he was into a freefall passion with the actress Elizabeth Ashley. As if a space had become free, one of the film’s stars, Warren Oates, had a fling with Becky, though she ended up marrying its other star, Peter Fonda. And then McGuane saw Margot Kidder. It’s like a libertarian Bonnie and Clyde – ‘we ...”

“... was burned in effigy while tea and cakes were served. Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and the young Elizabeth Barrett were among those who felt that as women they must support the queen. That a woman, a wife and a mother could be subjected to such public humiliation seemed to undermine both ancient ideas of chivalry and modern ones of emancipation. There were ...”

“... hotel’; on Mary McCarthy, who had ‘a behind built on the lines of a canal barge’. The writer Elizabeth Jenkins was granted a wondrous tribute in a letter to Virginia Woolf: a disordered blonde, about whom I felt something that could only be expressed by the haughty words I heard a lady use to another at 1 in the morning at the corner of Dover ...”

“... glimpses of melodrama, or worse – a quarrel springing up among Gig Young, George Hamilton and Elizabeth Montgomery. And there’s absolute vacancy – as in one picture of Edie Goetz, a daughter of Louis B. Mayer. These pictures say so much more than discreet testimony could ever allow. Even if he was never a sure movie-maker, Dunne had enough of an eye ...”

“... He is provoked by the only thorough survey of the impact of printing to have been written, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (published in 1979 and abridged as The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe in 1983). Eisenstein argued – though less insistently than Johns’s criticisms might suggest – that one ...”

“... so sharp that they cut just to look at them. In Jack Ubaldi’s Meat Book, which he dictated to Elizabeth Crossman and published in 1987, he invoked his childhood in Umbria during the Great War in scenes worthy of Manzoni: When I was a little boy in Italy, every Fall my father and some of his friends and helpers slaughtered hogs. They processed them into ...”

“... joint sovereign by Parliament in 1689, we find the ancient too ancient for belief; according to Elizabeth Murray, young James’s acquaintance was an ancient who had known another ancient who had witnessed the event. The difficulty of finding a publisher and coming to terms induced Furnivall to complain about the ‘shiftiness and cupidity’ of the ...”

“... circuit, from California to Australia, from the Netherlands to Benares. One daughter, the composer Elizabeth Lutyens, remembered the family sitting with hands outstretched, in a cloud of incense, chanting ‘I am a link in a golden chain of love which stretches round the world’; their father, one imagines, was not in the room. Edwin Lutyens, having ...”

“... on the docks in Barcelona shows the slaves’ fetters lined with cloths to try to stop chafing. Elizabeth McGrath discusses at far greater depth in From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem, her forthcoming book on depictions of slaves, how this article of dress (so to speak) recurs often invisibly, a symbol of slavery itself. Although Rublack ...”

“... a profession of Protestant faith in Shakespeare’s own hand, even a letter to the bard from Queen Elizabeth herself flowed from his ready quill. And once Ireland had sorted out a supply of ink and techniques for making paper look old, why not write versions of King Lear and Hamlet which omitted the awkward bawdy scenes? Why not even compose a whole new play ...”

“... emphasises Bligh’s gift for intimacy, especially with women. His correspondence with his wife, Elizabeth, is full of affection. ‘My Dear Dear Love and My Dear Children,’ he begins one letter, assuring his wife: ‘I love you dearer than ever a Woman was loved.’ Not that dear ‘Betsy’ was fooled into thinking that her husband had no steel in ...”