“... There are fewer than a hundred parishes to give a base for the period before the accession of Elizabeth I. It may also have been a mistake to have selected parishes by size, for the pattern of child and infant deaths seems to have differed according to the size of the parish. But the Cambridge Group were working with over three million figures, and it ...”

“... is, at best, fruitless egoism. This doctrine, which would have been music to the ears of Elizabeth I, had some distinguished adherents. The period of Lipsius’s life and influence is the period of the external conservatism and internal radicalism of Montaigne and of Bacon. It is also the period of the Family of Love, the heretical sect with which ...”

“... only to be expected. Even a literary wife as talented as her husband, like the second Mrs Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, finds her work calibrated on the scale of accomplishment not achievement, and the sincerest recognition still hints at the escape from the washing-up or stolen hours while children sleep. Whether you call this condescension or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cathedral organs were being demolished and the choirs set to singing metrical psalms, but when Elizabeth ascended the throne, she ignored that trajectory, and her own Chapel Royal set a standard of musical elaboration and beauty that the Church of England has never forgotten. Westminster Abbey, across the road from the Palace of Whitehall, was frequently ...”

“... common, sealed coffins sometimes exploded’ because of it. There is a story that the corpse of Elizabeth I – retained for more than a month before burial – blew up, shattering the wooden coffin and lead sarcophagus in which it was being kept. (The story was itself political dynamite, and her courtiers evidently tried to keep it secret, while Papists ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... lover turns out to be a Spanish chef capable and indeed only too pleased to produce delicious pre-Elizabeth David food for the ravenous Radletts.13 February. ‘God’s honour’ we used to swear as boys. This remembered in the middle of an acute attack of arthritis pain this morning when I’m marooned on the sofa, cold, thirsty but unable to move. ‘I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an evaluation of its chances involves understanding the problems and aims of Cardinal Fleury and Elizabeth Farnese. Even though the exploration of English Jacobitism in this book is superficial, the European dimension makes it a great deal more than the exploration of an anachronistic quirk of Scottish history. It is natural that this book, while ostensibly ...”

“... as the defence of such a crime’. There was also a petition organised by Pratt’s wife, Elizabeth, signed by 55 respectable citizens, including – and this seems to fit my picture of them – the Berkshires, at least semi-repentant.All of this, Bryant thinks, should have told on Russell and on the other members of the government who gathered to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... relentlessly to biographical chronology. It is very much a life – the best in English since Elizabeth Rawson’s fifty years ago – not a life and times. The context of that life will be unintelligible without some prior knowledge of Roman republican history, and all but the most expert will at times struggle to remember what role one character or ...”

“... like a nightmare, hotted-up Lady Colefax.’ Then this: ‘a three-cornered conversation with Elizabeth [Bowen] on the awfulness of women writers and the nastiness of her friend Mrs Woolf’. ‘There is something wrong with a world in which one meets Mrs Lowinsky and Roger Hinks and Mrs Royde-Smith. They smell of middlebrow.’ The Journal will record ...”