“... the name of the girl, an interesting predecessor of Saints Bernadette and Thérèse of Lisieux, or Elizabeth Radclyfe, Yeats’s psychic medium, and many more young females who have altered their status and their influence thanks to their persuasive skills in clairvoyance. A vision and a haunting are different, however, because medieval ghosts were ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on top of the daughter he had fathered before he married, he had himself had two children by Lady Elizabeth Foster (Bess); according to the double standards of the day that, however, was fully acceptable, and the Duke’s bastards by Bess were brought up alongside his legitimate children. Rather more unusually, Bess, too, lived in Devonshire House with the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are a thing of the past. ‘You cannot seduce anyone when innocence is not a value,’ Elizabeth Hardwick said in ‘Seduction and Betrayal’, with the clear implication that it is not a value now. In fact, the only innocence about which we still obviously care is the innocence of children: and there is no doubt that, unlike adults, children may ...”

“... Taking up Connolly’s plea for state support to the writer, Orwell demanded £1000 a year, Elizabeth Bowen £3500, while Robert Graves could only suggest ‘living off friends’, and V.S. Pritchett, with sturdy virtue, opined that ‘the failures of overwork are fewer than the failures of idleness.’ Evelyn Waugh, on the whole in kindly ...”

“... and at sea. They were also partners in crime. Myers quotes from an Old Bailey trial in which Elizabeth Mandeville, who was black, was prosecuted for working ‘as one of a pair with Ann Grace (a white woman) to steal three half guineas and six shillings from John Pidduck. Grace extracted the money while Mandeville pinned the victims down.’ She also ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of motives for Ralegh’s Orinoco plan, from mysticism to the desire for fast bucks; from winning Elizabeth back by driving a wedge into Spanish territory, to adventurism and intellectual curiosity. Ralegh had been intrigued years earlier by a theory he had first encountered in conversations with a Spanish Inca scholar captured by his privateers, that El ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire, which includes some pieces written by Shelley’s sister Elizabeth, is a collection of amateurish lyrics, or ‘songs’, and Gothic fragments, as well as one wholesale plagiarism from Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis. The presence of the plagiarised poem, probably added to fill out the volume, makes Shelley’s yearning to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”