“... absurdity – or, to put it more bluntly, with the morally intolerable, the morally unthinkable. Elizabeth Anscombe once said that anyone who thought in advance that it was open to question whether an action such as procuring the judicial execution of an innocent person should be entirely excluded from consideration showed a corrupt mind. She thereby ...”

“... whoever wrote it … A British astronaut would have stuck in a flag and said: “I name this moon Elizabeth.”’ And Michael Collins – the Apollo 11 astronaut left behind orbiting in the command module – was the first of several Apollonians who suggested eventually sending a ‘priest, poet or philosopher’: ‘From these people you might get a much ...”

“... misfiring bits of attention-seeking. When Will laments his sickness, while the ‘mobbled queen’ Elizabeth I is on progress, there is a classic piece of Burgessian talent abuse: ‘I can hardly move, sick not in my body but only in my soul, centre of my sinful earth. I lie on my unmade bed listening to time’s ruin, threats of Antichrist, new galleons on ...”

“... has called the effect ‘restrained’). It’s modern without being Modernist, exactly. It has Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamund Lehmann in it, and Patrick Hamilton, and Denton Welch. The language is rich in period detail, not locked up for best in the china cabinet, but out there among the everyday cups and saucers, working hard: ‘You nit’, ‘Little ...”

“... fall down upon the tiler. Bacon ‘Apophth.’. Or custody: The council remonstrated upon Queen Elizabeth the conspiracies against her life, and therefore they advised her, that she should go less abroad weakly attended; but the queen answered, she had rather be dead than put in custody. Bacon. There are improving precepts of behaviour and ...”

“... the transcript of their news conference at West Point (see the New York Times, 28 January), where Elizabeth Swift says quite explicitly that Newsweek lied about what she said, inventing a story about torture (much amplified by the media) that had nothing to do with the facts. It was the leap from a specific experience – unpleasant, anguished, miserably long ...”

“... pregnant with a Plantagenet child. Too much depends on the supposition that after his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville Edward IV would have sired no more bastards: that king’s reputation runs another way. As deputy of Calais, Lisle was evidently conscientious and reasonably thorough – not by any means the ninny that recent tradition had made him – but ...”

“... to charming ingrates. In any event, like a Depression-era mother in a James Cagney film, Elizabeth couldn’t see the bad in her boy. The worse he got, the more she wanted to camouflage him with medals, rosettes and ribbons. The irony is that he treated her as badly as he treated every other woman, flogging Sunninghill, the house she gave him as a ...”

“... target for quantitative analysis as early as 1930, when J.P. Oakden (with the ‘assistance’ of Elizabeth Innes – much of the hard graft of early computational work in English literature was done by women) attempted to calculate the frequency of various forms of alliteration across a raft of Middle English poetry. Oakden found that 63.7 per cent of ...”

“... hay cart; that she has a brother called Thomas and another called William and a twin sister called Elizabeth; that her mother recently died of cancer; that her father is called Hastings and is a retired colonel. That is about it. This might serve as a modest sketch of someone’s life, but is wholly lacking in the richness of detail one can expect to emerge ...”

“... not been a girl she would have inherited Knole. The house, given to Thomas Sackville by his cousin Elizabeth I, was, in its way, quite magnificent, with 52 staircases and one bedroom for each day of the year; seen from across the park, as Vita put it, it seemed ‘less a house than a medieval village’ (wandering into the Great Hall one day, she came face to ...”

“... Nothing makes a Britfem feel more parochial than to see one of the Americans fill the Queen Elizabeth Hall to capacity when she is grateful to be asked to a local bookshop. For years now, British feminism has been desperately trying to achieve mainstream appeal. Catchy booktitles, styled photographs, radio and television appearances have done their bit ...”

“... old Republican and Communist Peadar O’Donnell. It attracted an eclectic range of contributors: Elizabeth Bowen, John Hewitt, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Hubert Butler, Flann O’Brien, Liam O’Flaherty and others. ‘Cannot we all meet, throwing in what we have?’ Bowen wrote in her essay ‘The Big House’, published in the Bell’s first ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”