“... Normans, with their castles, and later the neo-Palladians, who imposed rigid Italianate symmetry. Elizabeth, queen of ‘merry England’, was a Good Thing, ‘just, sensible and far-sightedly astute’, and under her the ‘stalwart Gothic tradition’ was largely protected from foreign infection. The Stuarts, on the other hand, were Bad, ‘despotic and ...”

“... handle. Thanks to books like this one, the history of female espionage – from Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Van Lew to Lotus Blossom to Stella Rimington – is slowly being filled out. Proctor believes, however, that female intelligence work is even now generally regarded as ‘exceptional, rare and surprising’ – in popular representations of ...”

“... a naval vessel”, with all the guns run out’; perhaps more tellingly, a character in an Elizabeth Bowen novel based partly on Bowra is said, when entering a room, to be always ‘delighted to see himself’. He spoke with a booming voice, which got louder as he got deafer: ‘He really ought to be fitted with a silencer,’ one friend ...”

“... 1950; the birth dates for Beier’s sample (which includes oral histories gathered in the 1970s by Elizabeth Roberts, one of the method’s great pioneers, for whom Beier worked), by contrast, range from 1872 to 1958. Beier, in other words, is examining the practices not only of Fisher’s informants’ generation, but also those of their parents and their ...”

“... I call Me’. Split personalities and doubles are common in her work. In The Bird’s Nest, Elizabeth Richmond discovers through hypnosis that she has four different selves. The two sisters in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Merricat and Constance, are complementary: Constance is shy and uneasy; Merricat is outgoing, bold, superstitious and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 1846, Hayter’s account weaves together the lives of the famous, the obscure and the forgotten. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning plan their elopement. Samuel Rogers entertains the Gräfin Hahn-Hahn, a romantic novelist who has come to meet her English public and disappoints them by turning out to have false teeth and a glass eye. The painter Benjamin ...”

“... to the industrial conflicts of early 20th-century America. A speech given by the labour organiser Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at a silk-workers’ strike in Paterson, New Jersey in 1913 inspired in him a sense of ‘the likeness of all human beings and their problems’, a feeling he could still recall in his eighties. The conception of socialism as the natural ...”

“... the title is another line from an advert – imagines what it would be like to drive alongside Elizabeth Taylor in midtown Manhattan (the windshield is a picture of the United Nations building turned on its side). Hamilton produced a few more semi-figurative combinations of sexy commodities and commodified women in a sustained attempt ‘to capture those ...”

“... of an affluent London vintner, he was fortunate as a teenager to gain a place in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, whose husband was Edward’s second surviving son. Aged about 15, Chaucer ‘steps off the page as a fashion plate, dressed to the nines in clothes so breathtakingly fashionable and daring that contemporary commentators condemned them as ...”

“... the huge success of the screen version of her 1935 novel National Velvet, starring a 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. It sometimes seems that the enthronement of Virginia Woolf in the canon has entailed the demotion of a whole generation and a bit of women, not just Bagnold (born 1889) but Rose Macaulay (born 1881) and Sylvia Townsend Warner (born 1893). This ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”