“... Amis finds room for another argument with himself about Israel, two passages (one reprinted) on Elizabeth Jane Howard, and a post-postscript describing a dream about her dog. Another difficulty is the range of Martin Amises on offer. Here he’s a distinguished, thoroughly normcore man of letters, there he’s a feral, muscle-flexing cult writer, and ...”

“... 16th century, England had already set up companies to trade with Russia and the Levant. In 1600, Elizabeth I chartered the East India Company (EIC) with monopoly rights for trade in the Indian Ocean region. Two years later, the Dutch East India Company was founded, the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC). These two organisations are prime examples of the ...”

“... Jesus, no good angels, only a hell there was, and devils to carry me thither’. We also hear of Elizabeth, wife of the Nonconformist minister Oliver Heywood, who battled throughout her life with ‘the unbeleefe of her own heart’. But these are exceptions that seem to prove Hunter’s rule that Christian doubt differs from the rational scepticism of the ...”

“... a particular individual in the real world that the picture portrays – in my imagined case, Queen Elizabeth II. Plainly, one way we recognise the external subject of a picture is by seeing the resemblance between a particular real individual and the picture’s internal subject. But the question the resemblance theory is supposed to answer is not: ‘How does ...”

“... nearly contemporary Lighthouse at Two Lights by Edward Hopper. Hopper painted the light at Cape Elizabeth, Maine, by day in strong sun with his characteristic hard shadows. The lighthouse is unlit; the keeper’s gothic cottage beside it looks empty and the atmosphere is, if not sinister, then desolate and oppressive. Perhaps the greatest lighthouse image ...”

“... pseudonym of Arran Leigh (the name, as well as the poetry, revealed the influence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh). Celebrating the love of women and girls, this collection, a mixture of original compositions and translations, is full of sunlight and flowers. It is also prefaced by a sonnet in which the author addresses her ...”

“... on Carney’s struggle to join the elite of Harlem society – the world of his in-laws. Elizabeth, Carney’s wife, was raised on Striver’s Row with notches on the doorframes marking her growth; now she lives in a ‘dark apartment with a back window that peered out onto an air shaft and a front window kitty-corner to the elevated 1 ...”

“... into foul stinking privies, where you can find as many gods as you want if you care to look.’ Elizabeth Sampson, hauled before the bishop of London, put it more succinctly: Our Lady of Willesden ‘was a brent ars Elfe’. But as bishops went hunting through parishes for heresy, they also found people who held the old ways disturbingly close, with a ...”

“... all printers after him, kept his business afloat through these slenderest of texts. The historian Elizabeth Eisenstein caught this nicely when she observed that the printing revolution was not ‘centrally about the history of books’, but rather a wider, wilder sea of ‘images and charts, advertisements and maps, official edicts and indulgences’. The ...”

“... could he even appear under many guises, so that one might think of a particular person (Donne’s Elizabeth Drury, for example) as Christ? Although Empson has a lot of fun inventing a system of music appropriate to a ‘sexless’ species, and imagining the Wuzzoo attitude to babies (‘Do your women like having to look after these things? Of course they are ...”

“... to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah (Cajah), Leonora Elizabeth (Betsey), Emma and baby John. Here, in the summer of 1820, William Hazlitt entered their lives, and here Sarah steps into the limelight of the Liber Amoris. That book remains the primary source for what happened between them – how could it be ...”

“... Mitchell’s mother who had more to do with forming the taste and character of the man Joe became. Elizabeth Parker Mitchell, called Betty, was the first on either side of the family to earn a college degree (Southern Presbyterian in Red Springs, North Carolina) and she wanted her children to feel they were part of the larger world. She subscribed to dozens of ...”

“... claimed independence from Britain in 1966. The only public referral hospital, named after Queen Elizabeth, in the capital city, Maseru, was decrepit, poorly run and subject to explosive outbreaks of drug-resistant TB: few if any Basotho mourned plans for its closure and replacement. The question was who would build a new hospital and how it would be paid ...”

“... him. Mathematically sharp, he yearned to be an economist. Among the activists in Nairobi was Sara Elizabeth Mooney, a 43-year-old Texan and literacy teacher, who offered Barack a job as her secretary. He cultivated an academic look, with horn-rimmed glasses and pipe. Mooney found him exceptionally promising: his ebullience, his self-confidence and his ...”

“... late in life that she and Henri had met at a costume ball in Brussels. She had been dressed as Elizabeth I; he – appropriately enough for a prince – had been a slim, pomaded, unusually fetching Hamlet. 3. The Doted-On Wastrel Son. Prince Henri’s By-Blow, Most Likely. Bernhardt had him in 1864, when she was 20. She named him Maurice but she might as ...”