“... 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 ...”

“... it was buried in the grounds of his Hampshire home – to mark the wedding of the young Princess Elizabeth. In this, he told future generations how the seeds of social destruction were being sown in his own time by the mass media and the spread of ‘the false, pernicious doctrine that “all men are equal”’, and urged his descendants to rebel against ...”

“... and with operations, performed by Fliess, on his turbinate bones. This point is not incidental: Elizabeth Thornton has plausibly suggested that Freud’s ‘hysterical’ symptoms may have been a consequence of the cocaine therapy that Fliess had initially prescribed for his migraines. Ignoring this possibility, Micale boils down Freud’s ‘hysteria’ to ...”

“... Facebook may have started as a way to rank one woman’s hotness over another’s, but it has been quick to produce its first feminists. Everything goes faster in Silicon Valley: code is written overnight; engineers get around the office on aerodynamic skateboards called RipStiks; a company less than ten years old is worth $104 billion for a day before losing $35 billion in value ...”

“... that war with Germany was imminent and Cameron telephoned home to give his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, the news. She received it without apparent emotion and with an awkwardness of tone that made an impression on the Irish writer and occasional IRA gunman Sean O’Faolain, with whom she was in bed at the time. He made a joke about it, which she ...”

“... 4’s In Our Time that he was in effect speaking French in English; and at a recent conference Elizabeth Archibald suggested that he was writing macaronics – those poems that combine two or more languages within a single verse form – only in a single language. Most of us will be most familiar with macaronics through a carol such as ‘In Dulci ...”

“... no mistaking the real-life basis of the book, even if you don’t read the acknowledgments, where Elizabeth Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered and Solomon Volkov’s Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich are cited as sources. Barnes has done something of the kind before with The Porcupine, based on the trial of the Bulgarian communist leader ...”

“... forgets. A second never knows.’ Supposedly, we only learned how to eat well as a nation when Elizabeth David travelled to the Mediterranean and brought back news of olives, apricots and taramasalata. (Mediterranean Food was published in 1950.) But Meades recalls how his own mother’s cooking changed in the late 1950s, and not necessarily for the ...”

“... more horrific – than human utterance on either fact or fancy, perhaps, ever formed before’. Elizabeth Sheridan, wife of the playwright and Burke’s fellow prosecutor, fainted dead away in shock; Burke himself was seized with a stomach cramp and had to retire for the day. With displays of such melodramatic power, it was no wonder that when Sheridan took ...”

“... and the FWP’s special consultant on folklore, noted on 14 January 1937: Farm Woman (Case #2): (Elizabeth Bradley) The story is pointless save as a commentary on the benevolent institution of slavery . . . Capitalise Negro throughout. Par. 2: ‘Familiar traits of the Negro race’ is bad . . . Occasionally there are blanket statements in which ...”

“... mixed-blood Anglo-Indians, assertions of their Indian origins: one of James Skinner’s daughters, Elizabeth Wagentreiber, frequently invoked her father’s name and her part-Indian lineage as she shepherded her family out of rebel-held Delhi.) Disguise as a survival tactic figures less in the novels, however, than disguise as a strategy, and this also had ...”

“... At Thomas Hodgkin’s memorial service, in 1982, Christopher Hill, formerly Master of Balliol, used the pulpit of the college chapel to give an address entirely free of religious reference, quite a feat in view of Hodgkin’s Quaker roots and Hill’s status as historian of the Puritan revolution. ‘God was dead all right when you wrote that speech,’ I said to Hill afterwards ...”