“... legitimation – Bidart makes the case against it when he turns up a 1959 letter of Lowell’s to Elizabeth Bishop: ‘In the hospital I spent a mad month or more rewriting everything in my three books’ – Lord Weary’s Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies. ‘I arranged the poems chronologically, starting in Greek and Roman times and finally ...”

“... about which, of course, we know a good deal more. The usual suspects are close on his heels – Elizabeth I (1533-1603, ‘queen of England and Ireland’), Cromwell (1599-1658, ‘Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland’), Wellington (1769-1852, ‘army officer and prime minister’), Victoria (1819-1901, ‘queen of the United Kingdom of Great ...”

“... then, still convalescent from illness, only because of an aberrant desire to meet the young Queen Elizabeth during her tour of the Antipodes in 1954. She charmed him. Stricken by remorse for a lifetime of stiffnecked pride, he dragged himself again from his sickbed on the following Sunday to seek forgiveness at the nearest church. He died from a stroke within ...”

“... three children, it was the only one who was immune to these emotions who inherited the throne. Elizabeth of Bohemia could well have become the focus for some of the aspirations centred on Prince Henry, yet Charles could not. How far Charles, like Harold Wilson, was handicapped by a ‘lost leader’ myth around him is a question to which the answer is not ...”

“... her or leave her: she is what she is. And she is powerful. Flanking her are her four daughters, Elizabeth, Mary, Henrietta and Anne. She would marry two of them off to dukes, and two of them to earls. And when the time came, she would net as partners for her seven granddaughters five dukes, an earl and a viscount. As for her husband and son, she would ...”

“... A recent interview I had with the chairman of the Russian Central Bank exemplifies the dangerously tense atmosphere within which the politics of the Soviet Union have been conducted since the August putsch – and underscores the importance of what Arkady Vaksberg writes in his uneven, irritating but critically important book. What Georgy Matiukhin wanted to say was that a large part of the developing business culture of the Soviet Union was criminal ...”

“... for she is a writer in a very different tradition from such conventional courtly biographers as Elizabeth Longford, Cecil Woodham-Smith and Georgina Battiscombe. She lectures in history at Birmingham University, she specialises in the study of early 19th-century popular protest, and her published work on the Chartist movement has been ‘written in general ...”

“... in line to the throne. King George VI was 41 when Edward VIII unexpectedly abdicated. And Queen Elizabeth II spent her first decade with no inkling that she might one day be called upon to reign. Taken together, these examples suggest that the best preparation for the job of sovereign is not to be prepared for it at all, or not to be too well prepared for ...”

“... tutor a box of dried plums, the box is directed to you; tell him it is a Lenten token.’ From Elizabeth Mackenzie, nursing in the Crimea, in 1855, to her aunt: ‘Your box has at length arrived safely and its contents are most useful and acceptable.’ From Eleonora Pemberton, a volunteer in Boulogne in 1914, to ‘My dearest little mum’: ‘The ...”

“... Trek enthusiast called TCP ‘Germy’ Hinton on the Oxford leg, passing by the grave of John Dee, Elizabeth I’s court wizard, an allegorical theme-park called Milton Keynes and other centres of deep and magical significance, as they go. Why are they doing this? Because they have been sent on a quixotic chase after a texte de fétiche, a putative sequel to ...”

“... women for women readers. McGann indeed represents the later 1820s by Felicia Hemans and Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, and describes the phase as Romanticism’s ‘commercialised nightmare’, but not, it seems, unhappily. Romanticism proper is for him the glittering, commercialised, non-natural side of the period’s literary production. His anthology dreams ...”

“... outer wall of Henry VII’s tomb to look down on Torrigiano’s effigies of Henry and his queen, Elizabeth of York. And wonderful it is, except that there is also something of the top of the wardrobe about it, the ramparts of the tomb quite dusty with a few old planks lying about and odd bits of flex; one half-expects to see a suitcase or two. Alfie, the ...”

“... lips tremble; and softly, effortlessly, their fingers intertwined.   ‘Catherine-Nicaise-Elizabeth Leroux, of Sassetot-la-Guerrière, for fifty-four years’ service at the same farm, a silver medal – worth twenty-five francs!’ Flaubert’s proto-cinematic montage crashes the two centres of interest against each other to vividly ambiguous ...”

“... an admirable inversion, a sort of in-between sex with many good features. Radical feminists like Elizabeth Wolstenholme argued that menstruation is the unnatural result of male sexual appetite and that in a natural, healthy state women, like the lower mammals, would not be constantly available to the opposite sex. In short, every view found its biological ...”

“... pots boiling at once. Unlike most of the major Victorian women novelists, with the exception of Elizabeth Gaskell, Oliphant was also a mother, and one who professed in her Autobiography that ‘at my most ambitious of times I would rather my children had remembered me as their mother than in any other way.’ When her husband died after seven years of ...”