“... before American audiences in a student touring production or that, as a child, she came second to Elizabeth Taylor for the lead role in National Velvet. When that gift for performance is combined with profound democratic convictions – with the belief, which she surely has, that she speaks for a common good above the interests of party or class – the ...”

“... or ‘God’s wounds’ or ‘bastard’ depends on who you say it to and why – as Queen Elizabeth I’s lord deputy in Ireland Sir John Perrot discovered when his secretary told on him for saying ‘God’s wounds, this it is to serve a base bastard pissing kitchen woman.’ Oaths can carry their potential to hurt or shock into normal ...”

“... research materials, including the manuscripts of all his novels from Dusklands (1974) to Elizabeth Costello (2003). Remarkably, ‘the manuscript entries and revisions are meticulously dated,’ and include discussions and criticisms of the work’s progress. It is as if, from the start, Coetzee had always thought of the creative process as something ...”

“... us.’ The author and scholar Catherine Talbot, writing to the poet and translator of Epictetus, Elizabeth Carter (and not, as Martin has it, the other way round), said of a piece of Johnson’s anonymous writing: ‘I discern Mr Johnson … as evidently as if I saw him through the keyhole with the pen in his hand.’ Just as his singularity enables ...”

“... by the petite bourgeoisie (Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot)? I don’t think, as Carey does, that Elizabeth Bowen ‘goes beyond’ Henry James (whom Carey doesn’t seem to like) in her ability to depict inner thought and feeling, and I am unable to make sense of his claim that Lucky Jim represents ‘one of the first attempts in English to describe women ...”

“... that was made of a certain novel by me’ – i.e. The Ice Storm. He’s the male counterpart to Elizabeth Wurtzel, the overachieving underachiever who wowed readers with her daredevil debauchery in Prozac Nation and then would throw in, almost as an afterthought, being accepted at Harvard or selling a piece to Rolling Stone. Despite Wurtzel’s image as an ...”

“... tolerance of religious difference, and discussing freedom and justice. ‘This proposal is less Elizabeth I and Winston Churchill than Barney the Dinosaur meets the Commission for Racial Equality,’ the Times snorted. ‘Whatever Britishness may be, it is surely not the mush that is now being proposed.’ All that one can say is that the mush spoken about ...”

“... Gaggia’s wonderful coffee machine; we sniff the first whiffs of garlic and olive oil from Elizabeth David’s Book of Mediterranean Food; we hear the first chords of Bill Haley and the Comets. We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy ...”

“... Girls provides many instances of women who found a stronger sense of themselves in self-denial. Elizabeth Pinnance, a rug-weaver from Huddersfield, was another who did time in Holloway in 1907. On the sitting-room wall of her granddaughter’s neat suburban home, an illuminated testimonial presented to her by Mrs Pankhurst is still proudly displayed, with ...”

“... Those men wanted to restore what they took to have been the political harmony of the reign of Elizabeth I. There was, Trevor-Roper thought, no basic divide of political theory between king and Parliament, both of whom called for a ‘limited’ or ‘mixed monarchy’. The division between Roundheads and Cavaliers was the cause, not a consequence, of the ...”

“... by contemporaries than today’. Yet Charlemagne’s state was at least as much a welfare state as Elizabeth I’s England; its people demanded similarly effective deployment of prayer and charity, and they demanded justice, too. As for the state’s demands on its people, they were, for us unexpectedly, in some senses more numerous, if also more ...”

“... F.T. (Filippo Tommaso) Marinetti liked to describe himself as the ‘caffeine of Europe’. He was undoubtedly the most daring and inventive artistic propagandist of the 20th century, and Futurism, the movement he launched with a manifesto published on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, reconfigured the popular notion of modern art and the modern artist more widely and decisively than any of the other isms now gathered under the umbrella heading of Modernism ...”

“... the education director’s pious assassin, who tells his victim that ‘the celebrated film star Elizabeth Taylor . . . might have known some happiness’ if she’d taken the veil. (‘Why are you laughing, sir?’) Kars is haunted by its Armenian history, and Pamuk has Ipek discuss a local museum commemorating ‘the Armenian Massacre. Naturally, she ...”

“... written a poem about, say, catching an old fish and staring at it and then just letting it go? As Elizabeth Bishop told Robert Lowell, ‘I find I’m really a minor female ...”

“... and witchcraft are far differing sciences,’ an idea with a long pedigree in the English state. Elizabeth I made witchcraft a felony in 1563, yet employed Dr John Dee as court magician. Not everyone agreed with the distinction. Exasperated Protestant clerics held that magic and witchcraft were the same, insisting even that village white witches were worse ...”