“... detail about the recent excavations) and theatre business (including relations with the courts of Elizabeth and James, patrons and censors) is also exemplary. He agrees with the view now widely accepted (and in some measure an achievement of the New Historicists) that the theatre was at least latently a site of subversion, ready to ‘confront Lenten ...”

“... turning into dust or sand, and it would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a big ring on Elizabeth Taylor’s finger.’ A decade before Warhol disappeared, he spent his afternoons in business meetings, and his nights at Studio 54. A bedlam of cocaine and orgasms and famous names and Quaaludes and tears, Studio 54 was the endzone of the New York ...”

“... genius who nonetheless wrote brilliantly, out of their whole autonomy: Lowell’s second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, for example. Jean Rhys made her genius out of her abjection. Stafford’s marriage to Lowell lasted eight years. Throughout the relationship, he was unpredictable and violent, already manifesting the mental instability which would necessitate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in my grandmother’s house, the house where my father had lived with his sisters. It came from Elizabeth Craig’s Household Library and was called 1000 Household Hints, published in 1947 by Collins, a Glasgow firm. ‘I know from experience how many minor emergencies a housewife has to meet in the course of her daily routine,’ Craig writes in her ...”

“... and the general tendency to blame the victim. In Germaine, her unauthorised biography of Greer, Elizabeth Kleinhenz is sometimes awkwardly caught between starstruck admiration for Greer and irritation that Greer refused to co-operate with her project in any way.1 The irritation is understandable: if, like Greer, you sell your archive to a major library, you ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... been women, not men, who have most carefully examined the features of such beautiful women, of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, for example, or Hollywood’s choices for the part of Helen. My first Helen was Rossana Podestà, in the 1956 Cinemascope spectacular. She wore what looked like a swimming cap of platinum curls, and played Helen as an ...”

“... for this portrayal of the Woolfs’ marriage is Virginia’s novel Flush, an imagined biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel. Woolf started work on Flush as a relaxation. ‘The gods of literature,’ Mitz’s narrator remarks, ‘punish writers who begin books in this spirit,’ and she ended up writing it as carefully and painfully as her other ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... popularised the term, ‘seraphick love’ with Anne Russell (whom he dubbed ‘Platona’) and Elizabeth Carey (who became his ‘Electra’). It is exceptionally hard to describe what Evelyn felt for these women: probably it is best to say that the concept of platonic love enabled this socially awkward and excessively serious man to talk easily and ...”

“... Jamie (two), Gordon, Nigella, the clownish American TV chef Emeril Lagasse, Julia Child, Elizabeth David, Irma Rombauer (compiler of the American suburban kitchen bible, The Joy of Cooking), and even Delia. In the US, the cable TV Food Network reaches 85 million households, guaranteeing financial success for its stars’ books, videos and restaurants ...”

“... Priscilla has an affair with Walter, who is the mentor of Phoebe, who forges a portrait of Elizabeth, who everyone loves. One of his quieter books is Twenty Lines a Day (1988), the result of his decision to follow Stendhal’s advice to begin each day by writing something – anything – without hesitation or revision. It’s a collection of pieces ...”

“... One of the general effects of hero-worship is its tendency to marshal resentment in those who claim themselves no party to the admiration. A good example of this offers itself at the opening of Vanity Fair – ‘A Novel without a Hero’ – when the single-minded Becky Sharp, high in a coach bound for Russell Square, flings a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary out of the window to land on the grass at the feet of her former teacher, a sworn disciple of the Great Lexicographer ...”