“... gate’. Aldington and H.D. had liked to imagine that their marriage resembled that of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but it’s rare for two poets to have a happy marriage. He tried to justify his actions by reproaching H.D., telling her that what he perceived as her ‘ardour for perfection’ was making her deeply unhappy; he told her that his ...”

“... murders of William the Silent and Henri III and Henri IV of France; the attempt to poison Queen Elizabeth; the numerous plots, in both his kingdoms, on the life of James VI and I – for threats and rumours of regicide to place nations on recurrent high alert. In life and art alike, there was a special frisson to death by poison. In 1612 the death of ...”

“... more serious business of having fun. Often, on encountering Mew’s children, I’m reminded of Elizabeth Bishop’s affection for a short story she came across in the New York Times, composed by an eight-year-old: ‘I told my little brother when you die you cannot breathe and he did not say a word. He just kept on playing.’The deaths of Mew’s little ...”

“... tend to take emphatic pride in their nation’s carriers: the Royal Navy refers to HMS Queen Elizabeth, launched in 2014, as ‘4.5 acres of floating sovereign power’. The US has eleven full-size fleet carriers, more than the rest of the world combined. It wasn’t always so. Japan had ten carriers by 1940 and Japanese admirals pioneered the carrier ...”

“... tried to coax informal revelations out of Roosevelt over lunch. He flirted with Ginger Rogers and Elizabeth Arden. He wrote The Gremlins (1943), about a pilot, for Walt Disney, but the film was never made. He slept with starlets – and then, in 1953, he married one. Patricia Neal, co-star with Ronald Reagan in The Hasty Heart and former lover of Gary ...”

“... of writers in Athens in 1962, the poet James Merrill and the British novelists Robert Liddell, Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym, she fled town as soon as she could, muttering that she wasn’t made for this kind of thing. She seems to have cut a formidable figure. ‘Mary Renault arrived all in gold lamé. Miss Pym (a failure) in her simple ...”

“... She has also had his tapestries displayed against light oatmeal fabric on the walls of the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in order to devise a setting where the ‘right solutions for Europe’ might be found. Fuller’s declaration that Europe and America have much to learn from us was published in the Salisbury Review in 1987 and then republished in ...”

“... Edward VI. The standard of living to which they then grew accustomed became a heavy burden under Elizabeth, whose favours to the family were intermittent and grudging. From the late 16th century to the late 17th – from the time of Sir Philip Sidney to that of his great-nephew the republican Algernon Sidney – there runs a current of failure and ...”

“... Seventy-four years ago a viral pandemic began in America, most likely on a pig farm in Iowa. Fifteen months later it had killed over eighteen million people, 1 per cent of the world’s population, as many as died in two world wars, almost ten times as many as have died in a decade of Aids. The virus, transmitted by airborne mucus and saliva, spread via coughs and sneezes ...”

“... of one who finds life difficult. The heartbreak he suffered over the death of his wife Tetty (Elizabeth Porter) can be caught even though it is expressed only indirectly. There are no letters directly describing her death, and the letters do not reflect the agony of the private prayers (which we also have), but any of Johnson’s references to his loss ...”

“... Morrison ... was Secretary of State to the Lord Monjoy, our chief Governour, in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth,’ says Sheridan, so he ‘had the best oportunity, of knowing the State of this Nation at that time’. An Irish rebellion led by ringleaders of English extraction, a pattern which seems to have remained consistent in Irish history to the time of ...”

“... Jackson (400 pp., £9.95, 1986, 0 85635 677 8). First Awakenings: The Early Poems, edited by Elizabeth Friedmann, Alan Clark and Robert Nye (280 pp., £14.95, 1992, 0 85635 985 8). Progress of Stories (380 pp., £9.95, 1986, 0 85635 678 6). Lives of Wives (328 pp., £12.95, 1988, 0 85635 748 ...”

“... print, of The Letters of William James, published in 1920, and in the Selected Letters edited by Elizabeth Hardwick in 1962, recently reissued in paperback. A substantial new collection is needed to confirm the identity of purpose between his letters and the almost equally informal and personal philosophical writings. It would be a logical extension of the ...”

“... right, was taken in to see him in his coffin. The steadying influence was their Yorkshire nurse, Elizabeth Goodman, tenderly described in Charlotte’s article ‘An Old Servant’: ‘as fixed a part of the Universe as the bath (cruelly cold in winter) into which she plunged us every morning, and the stars to which she pointed through the high ...”

“... Tennenhouse (PS) shows how the ‘carnivalesque’ was harnessed to official ideologies under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that the play’s formal involutions reflect, not transcendent truths about illusion and reality, but the ...”