“... the Tudor demesne of Richmond to create a landscape garden: a cave with wax statues of Merlin and Elizabeth I suggested the culmination of Arthurian prophecy in the Hanoverian monarchy. Frederick Louis, Caroline’s unpopular son, and his wife Augusta attempted to rival this display, planning a Mount of Parnassus, a House of Confucius and a Physic Garden. But ...”

“... children about, or sell to them, rather than simply give.Lilibet II’s great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon could get very caught up in the swooshiness of poetry. She loved going fishing with Ted Hughes. In the long boring afternoons in the Highlands, the hours between kippers and drinkies, poor Ted would take her down to the river and start ...”

“... with many opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since ...”

“... left for that purpose. There is a mother in Pride and Prejudice, but there are also two aunts: Elizabeth Bennet’s Aunt Gardiner and Mr Darcy’s aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh. It is an aspect of Austen’s genius that, while the novel negates the power and influence of Elizabeth’s mother, neutralises her by being ...”

“... sympathies on its jacket: where the Norton’s cover is illustrated with the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I standing on a map of England, the Longman’s is taken from the Book of Kells. ‘That the Science of Cartography. Is Limited’ is among the poems by Eavan Boland added to the latest edition of the Norton, and her title rings true. Maps have always ...”

“... Parker was raped and stabbed but survived. Taken captive along with Rachel and her son James were Elizabeth Kellog and Silas Parker’s children John and Cynthia Ann. John grew up to be a Comanche warrior, perhaps ending his life as a rancher in Mexico; Elizabeth was ransomed; Cynthia Ann became the wife of the war leader ...”

“... Mansfield’, her usual favourite, jostled for prominence with Käthe Schönfeld, Matilda Berry, Elizabeth Stanley, Julian Mark, Mrs K. Bendall, Kass, Katharina, Katoushka and Kissienka. The stories she told about herself often didn’t add up – biographers pick and choose which to believe, and hope for the best. Her handwriting was close to illegible, so ...”

“... on themselves: do I matter? It is a reaction to the totality presented in the poems. This is what Elizabeth Hardwick heard in Plath’s 1962 BBC recordings, and we must trust the diamond-hardness of Hardwick’s ear, sending out its ray like Marco’s stickpin in The Bell Jar: I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath reading. It was not anything like I could have ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... children scavenging for things to sell. Around 1860, a 13-year-old Irish boy, ‘dressed in a brown fustian coat and vest, dirty greasy canvas trousers roughly-patched, striped shirt with the collar folded down and a cap with a peak’, told Henry Mayhew that he and his younger brother spent their days gathering lumps of coal, iron rivets, bits of ...”

“... and at least one portrait in stumpwork. His style eventually became so recognisable that Craig Brown suggested his entire face, glasses, nose and moustache, could be bought in one piece from joke shops. His character turned out to be more difficult to get right. Having overcome crippling nerves, Strong discovered that he could ‘give delight’ as a ...”

“... during Burl’s excavation and the stone bank was rebuilt. Visitors are now directed to it by a brown ‘heritage’ sign and, Stone Circles tells us, there is a convenient car park with picnic table.Strichen’s story is not atypical. The appreciation and understanding of stone circles hasn’t been a linear process. For every advance there have been ...”

“... Sergei Ivanov. In a grisly footnote, Apostolos-Cappadona describes the afterlife of Grand Duchess Elizabeth, who became a nun after the assassination in 1905 of her husband, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, founding convents, hospitals and schools under the protection of Martha and Mary before her own assassination in 1918. In preparation for her canonisation ...”

“... some fairly celebrated figures in the lesbian haut monde. A friend of mine once had dinner with Elizabeth Bishop and her lover. Another met Marguerite Yourcenar. At Yale in the 1980s one of Blakey’s best friends slept with – well, perhaps you can guess. (True – the closet case actress!) Someone else I know went to a party in a Chicago highrise and ...”

“... took a job as a social worker and continued to write, eventually showing Second-Class Citizen to Elizabeth Stevens of Curtis Brown, who had the good idea of sending it to Allison and Busby, run by Margaret Busby, the UK’s first Black woman publisher. ‘Here was a group of people around my age who were talking of what ...”