“... 85th birthday of Vaughan Williams, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or the opening of Queen Elizabeth Hall, Day-Lewis obliged with an appropriate verse. These public poems are not very good: Day-Lewis was not by nature a rhetorician, and his public poetic voice was at best unconvincing, and at worst embarrassingly false (as in his unfortunate poem about ...”

“... only merit two pages in Volume I and the Thirty Years’ War (for example) does not even get that. Elizabeth Fox Genovese has broadened this line of criticism to note that almost all human strivings and conflicts are absent from Braudel’s new book. ‘His is a petrified world,’ she lamented, ‘not a human one.’ It is unlikely that this rebuke would ...”

“... however, it was Benjamin Jesty who deserves priority as the first known vaccinator. Benjamin and Elizabeth Jesty lived with their three children in Yetminster, North Dorset. In 1774, it was commonly believed that milkmaids were protected from smallpox because of previous exposure to the cowpox virus. Traditionally, milkmaids were thought to be fair and ...”

“... Woolf considered her musings about the war to be a ‘whiff of shot in the cause of freedom’. Elizabeth Bowen was even more grandiloquent: ‘Wartime writing is in a sense resistance writing.’ But in fact their subject and the attitude they were required to adopt forced them along paths which were not familiar to them, and often not ...”

“... operation for the stone, by subsequent brushes with death, or by fear of blindness. An entry on Elizabeth Pepys suggests that her chronic gynaecological troubles may have caused her husband to stray. So much for health. Volume I contains Latham’s excellent account of earlier editions of the diary. This reveals that in a Mid-Victorian transcription by the ...”

“... public discourse in general. As Cyndia Susan Clegg writes in her studies of press control under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts, censorship had always functioned via a range of regulations and mechanisms; it was a ‘crazy quilt’ of overlapping measures (proclamations, statutes, ordinances, prerogatives) emanating from, or enforced by, ‘a disarray of ...”

“... and forty people went down with the Princess Alice, including the husband and two children of Elizabeth Stride. Her family gone, she took to drink, went on the streets. She became one of the victims of Jack the Ripper – the kind of ominous coincidence that fiction needs to avoid if it is to be plausible. Life itself can afford to be more extrovert. So ...”

“... in Britain. Angus Wilson, Julian Maclaren-Ross and Francis Wyndham all praised him, as did Elizabeth Bowen, who described In Love as a ‘little masterpiece’. One by one his books fell out of print, until the reissue last year of In Love, My Face for the World to See and The Girl on the Via Flaminia (and in the US a few years earlier by New York ...”

“... In England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the ...”

“... literature between 1830 and 1860, a poem written in 1846 by a white woman abolitionist called Elizabeth Lloyd. Sanchez-Eppler again ‘finds many aspects of Crafts’s text problematic as the work of a woman who had spent much of her life as a plantation slave’, particularly her ‘general sense of isolation’, her ‘unusual attitude towards ...”

“... there were plenty of poets who did sell their work (including ones whom Dickinson revered, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning): I think the opposition between ‘Possibility’ and ‘Prose’ is not one between genres, but between modes of thought – imagination and reason, or fancy and fact. It was a commonplace of Romantic aesthetics that ‘poetry’ was ...”

“... century, making it even harder to interpret. He wrote a single sonnet to ‘Geraldine’ (Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald) which dwells in a quasi-heraldic manner on her geographical and dynastic origins. It concludes: Hunsdon did furst present her to myn eyen: Bryght is her hew, and Geraldine she hight; Hampton me tawght to wishe her furst for myne, And ...”

“... a showroom on Fifth Avenue and sending a set of dinnerware as a prenuptial gift for Princess Elizabeth. Tupperware was presented to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and the Maharaja of Ender, and in 1948 the Tupper ‘Millionaire Line’ of houseware won a major award from the journal Plastics World. But the reputation of plastic was so mixed (some kinds ...”

“... and golfe be utterly cryed down’, while Henry VIII made football a penal offence. Under Elizabeth I, the Grand Jury of Middlesex held that it was ‘an unlawful game, a great affray likely to result in homicides and serious accidents’, while the Puritans outlawed ‘football playing and other develishe pastimes’. This, in turn, led Charles II to ...”

“... case of incest; but also a houseful of real antiques, and a heroine who really does look like Elizabeth Taylor. Call it Indiana for beginners. The previous books have added to their allure by an aggressive approach to some of the last few taboos: gay sex (particularly when allied to violence and/or manipulation); violence (particularly when allied to ...”