“... can be as light on their poetical feet as Herrick, who was dubbed ‘the Ariel of poets’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He refers to both music and his own verse as ‘enchantments’ as though he did indeed learn from Ariel’s blend of magic and song. But he was a far more sociable poet than the lonely Ariel. Many of his pieces – and again this is a ...”

“... toreador is), plots a ‘perfect’ car crash in which his own vehicle will collide with Elizabeth Taylor’s (not a stand-in this time, but the actual actress – that is, the genuine stand-in) at the precise moment of his orgasm: a supremely wrought marriage of techne, spectacle, sex, death and all the rest. He finds out when her car will pass such ...”

“... liberation over the last 160 years in the US. By that measure Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, Bella Abzug, Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, Del Martin and Harvey Milk were just lowly practitioners of identity politics, which we’ve been told to get over. Shortly after the election ...”

“... oppressed individuals in our society’. Not once ‘in the thousand times we have met’ has Elizabeth Taylor refused him anything. Rita Hayworth entertains his ‘attempts to conduct myself as an adult’ as they go around town together. He was arrested in 1969 for forgery, telling a friend ‘I thought I was Loretta Young,’ and later for ...”

“... five stanzas, ending with a cleverly ironic twist. His aunt Jane sent the poem to her cousin Elizabeth Sherwood Rinehart, who passed it to her mother-in-law, Mary Roberts Rinehart, a popular mystery writer. Ashbery was told his poem had received ‘great acclaim’. Having thus conquered the realm of poetry, for the next few years he turned his attention ...”

“... the weather. Peter, their tenth child, said that he was a secret agent who worked for Queen Elizabeth. Brian, their fourth child, seemed well enough until, aged 22, he shot and killed his girlfriend, then himself. None of the Galvin siblings knew that Brian had been prescribed Navane, an antipsychotic. Mimi told her youngest children that he’d died in ...”

“... knows she is really dead.Summerscale mentions in passing that Fodor has begun psychoanalysis with Elizabeth Severn, an analysand of Sándor Ferenczi and another member of the institute. Severn, like Ferenczi, maintained that patients’ accounts of their sexual abuse as children were based on fact (Freud had argued that it was impossible to know when memories ...”

“... but all of whom could provide a gateway to lucrative Pentagon contracts. Theranos’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, even courted Special Operations Command, but this potential liaison was thwarted by the US Food and Drug Administration, which didn’t think much of her blood-testing machine.In an acute diagnosis of the power elite in the mid-20th century, the ...”

“... prominence in the Second World War as his father had in the First. In 1923 George VI’s wife, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who lost a brother at the Battle of Loos, had presented the Unknown Warrior with her wedding bouquet. It was an impromptu gesture that has endured: Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle and the princesses of York all sent their bouquets to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 his time, and yet who see the truth of his writings just as much as the courtiers of Queen Elizabeth did.’Literary scholars have been readier than historians to explore how Britain’s 350-year connection with extra-European empire shaped and complicated the identities and patriotisms within it. Even now, imperial history is still sometimes pursued ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”