“... Lawrence’s maxim ‘we shed our sicknesses in books’ is usually applied to Sons and Lovers, where he disposed of his nearly fatal over-attachment to his mother. But Women in Love is a cathartic novel too, though here the sickness is less easy to cure. The sickness itself is obvious enough: it is misanthropy, a continuous rage at almost everyone around ...”

“... further explanation of, say, quantitative verse. Personally I should have welcomed much more about Elizabeth Daryush, née Bridges, the poet’s elder daughter. Her poetry is not unknown; on the contrary Roy Fuller devoted an entire Oxford Lecture to it. But in this connection – she and her father worked together on metre – more could have been said ...”

“... who appear in Read. I particularly missed some of the Northern women writers such as Charlotte Elizabeth, Amanda McKittrick Ros, Frances Browne and Anne Crone, whose varieties of Unionism and feminism would have been intriguingly disruptive of the meta-narrative. Northern writing is otherwise well-represented. Tom Paulin edits a section on ‘Northern ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rather unexpectedly, to write syllabic verse – a departure which led to his calling on the aged Elizabeth Daryush, then a little known exponent of the method, and to the publication of a volume of hers with his Preface. Yet for all his various skills there is often in his writing – prose and verse – a certain ungainliness. It is not to be wished ...”

“... the head of the Warwickshire branch, Edward Arden, was first implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth I, then tried and executed. As a result, official persecution of Catholics in the area was renewed. Hughes notes that Shakespeare’s father, John, was a recusant, and he also accepts as genuine a Spiritual Testament, found in 1784 and signed by John ...”

“... I on the Romanov estate of Ismailovo. This may indeed have been English, perhaps even a gift from Elizabeth I to Ivan IV, but Peter first sought tuition in the shipyards of Amsterdam. It was only when the Dutch failed to instruct him ‘in the Mathematical Way’ he required that he repaired to England, ‘and there, in four Months Time, finish’d his ...”

“... as director of the Royal Ballet in 1963, saying that he felt ‘like James I succeeding Queen Elizabeth’. Despite the obsession with Fonteyn and Nureyev, he insisted that the company couldn’t be run ‘for the benefit of two people’, and created The Dream in 1964 for Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell, forging an ...”

“... game. Long afterwards one of them explained that they had been enacting a scene in which Queen Elizabeth sent Mary Queen of Scots to the scaffold. Had one of those long dropsical captions been lost? Was everyone drunk at the time? We shall never know. Today’s publications have their share of impenetrable joke drawings and it is well-known that any ...”

“... and, finally, Shakespeare’. The arrows Titus shoots at Astraea are, in effect, aimed at Queen Elizabeth, often represented as Astraea, who is thus clearly associated with Tamora, ‘the whoring queen of the Goths’. I have to quote, because paraphrase would lose the flavour of these extraordinary statements. If you trouble to learn this way of writing it ...”

“... He lives in a clean and spartan house that he stocks with crisps, ice cream and Cherry Coke. Kate Elizabeth Russell flags up all the warning signs to which Vanessa remains oblivious. Strane goes through a performance of initially asking for her consent – the abuser wants to believe that his victim is his knowing co-conspirator – only to dispense with all ...”

“... slave traders preyed and prospered.Of the proponents of free produce, none shines brighter than Elizabeth Heyrick. The Quaker daughter of a Leicestershire clothier, Heyrick achieved some celebrity when her polemical Immediate, Not Gradual Emancipation (1824) sped through multiple editions on both sides of the Atlantic. For Heyrick, the cause of free produce ...”

“... 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 ...”