“... rich and powerful didn’t abandon hope that a lowly alchemist might yet change the world. In 1565 Elizabeth set up a Dutch alchemist in his own workshop at Somerset House, prompting a flurry of envious petitions to the crown. By now, England’s entitlement to alchemic rewards was no longer justified only by antique precedent, but by the approval that had ...”

“... seen the republication of some American women writers of the mid-to-late 20th century, among them Elizabeth Hardwick, Jean Stafford (these two had been better known as Robert Lowell’s wives) and Lucia Berlin, whose luminous short stories seem to me as good as anyone’s. Now Picador have published Blue in Chicago, a collection of stories by Bette ...”

“... but not for many years.Rego and Willing met at a house party, sometime around the coronation of Elizabeth II. He was behind her on the stairs, and guided her into a bedroom. ‘Take down your knickers,’ he said. It didn’t occur to Rego to refuse. ‘I was a virgin, so you can imagine the mess,’ she told their son. ‘He could at least have hailed me a ...”

“... She​ was famous for being neglected,’ Lorna Sage once said of Christina Stead. In 1955, Elizabeth Hardwick, writing in the New Republic, described trying to obtain Stead’s address from her last American publisher. Only a few years before the New Yorker had called her ‘the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf ...”

“... belle négresse’. When Joshua Reynolds recorded studio sittings for his portrait of Elizabeth Keppel (c.1762), he listed eight appointments with Keppel and two morning sessions with the woman of African heritage who in the picture supplies a garland for the shrine of Hymen. In place of this woman’s name, Reynolds wrote, simply, and with not so ...”

“... the able-bodied unemployed in other people’s households, where they would serve for seven years. Elizabeth I, whose statute this was, had little interest in overseas solutions to economic problems; her successor, James VI and I, was more amenable, as long as it didn’t cost him anything. The foundation of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 fed unrealistic dreams ...”

“... the island. Money from the legal aid authority has paid for chickens and a coop for Denico in St Elizabeth, a motorbike and a driving licence for Chris in Kingston, and the restocking of Lorna’s market stall in Maypen. I don’t let the balance get close to zero – you never know when the next hurricane will ...”

“... to the letter: Elder John is based on Brother Egbert Gillette, who was tried alongside Eldress Elizabeth Sears. Rumours that Marchant was pregnant, and not really at death’s door, were disproved by the medical examiner. (In Banks’s version, the medical examiner gives false testimony about the pregnancy after poor Sadie’s body is exhumed.) In fact, no ...”

“... as anti-establishment. Jean Dubuffet invited the Themersons for tea in Provence; the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe offered them a bed for the night if they were ever in Cambridge. Even Prince Philip is here, thanking Stefan for sending a copy of one of his lectures. Philip encloses a lecture of his own, venturing that ‘parts of it seem to fit your ...”

“... other mine in the world: the Taylor-Burton Diamond, blinking out at Princess Grace of Monaco from Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage; the Golden Jubilee, described as a topaz in Thai state media so as not to burden the country with the knowledge that the king was buying diamonds the size of ping-pong balls during a financial crisis; the Centenary Diamond, the ...”

“... cruel’. We find Rawdon at Turnham Green ‘scoffing hot pies’, and James I’s daughter Elizabeth Stuart, not yet the Winter Queen and painted in her pomp, ‘all coral lips and candyfloss hair’. There are ‘snobs’, men get ‘tooled up’, ‘culture wars’ rage, and a poor man called Atkins ‘shat himself’. Childs also has an eye for ...”

“... and England’? Mr Baker shows a marked tendency to opt out. He declares the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II his formal end-point, but has trouble getting through 1945. A.P. Herbert’s ‘Mr Churchill’ is there to remind us that ‘Our Finest Hour revealed our Finest Man.’ But after that the story dies away in minor ditties by Sagittarius, Noel Coward ...”

“... life, and they settled in a tiny villa outside Rapallo. When Florence died, Max in old age married Elizabeth Jungmann, who had looked after the German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, and had more late years of wedded bliss. Max is not a specially good letter-writer but he does come over in every turn of phrase, and shares himself in each epistolary friendship. He ...”

“... of James’s youth to his family, or of the 1880s to Stevenson, or of the 1890s to the actress Elizabeth Robins and her friend Mrs Hugh Bell, Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters shows him joking in congenial company; this is the circle where the late James seems most to have unwound. The bulk of the letters we get here show the social and personal side ...”

“... as Professor Mebane calls it, was channelled into the cult-imagery which surrounded Queen Elizabeth. She was depicted as a new Astraea, the Goddess of Justice returning to earth to usher in the Golden Age. By extension, this reformist rhetoric was also used to vindicate imperial ambitions. England’s first toe-hold in the New World, Virginia, was ...”