“... and secular and religious events of these years. Anne Boleyn is beheaded. Jane Seymour becomes queen, has a son, dies. Abbeys are dissolved. The Plantagenet Pole family conspires against the crown. The rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace rises in the North, unhappy with reforms in the Church, and is put ...”

“... Mrs Barbauld was born Anna Letitia Aikin in 1743. She was educated at home, mostly by her mother and mostly in seclusion from the schoolboys her father taught. She learned Latin and some Greek despite her father’s reluctance to teach her, but never overcame an uneasiness about the unwomanly impropriety of erudition. The example of her father’s ...”

“... and his posting at the Court of the repulsive King Ferdinand of Naples and his clever, fecund Queen, Maria Carolina, placed him very much in the outer circle of British diplomacy. Emma was a blacksmith’s daughter who never lost her Lancashire accent. She went to London, as so many did, and saved herself from the ...”

“... Of aristocratic descent on both sides of the family, he inherited the Court connections of his mother, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. At the age of 12 he was a Page of Honour to George V and in the late 1940s Private Secretary to Princess Elizabeth. From Harrow, and Trinity ...”

“... or the 85th birthday of Vaughan Williams, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or the opening of Queen Elizabeth Hall, Day-Lewis obliged with an appropriate verse. These public poems are not very good: Day-Lewis was not by nature a rhetorician, and his public poetic voice was at best unconvincing, and at worst ...”

“... Carstairs, the subject of Kate Summerscale’s vastly entertaining new biography, The Queen of Whale Cay, would seem to fall into the latter category. In the Twenties, Carstairs (1900-93) was briefly yet wildly celebrated as the ‘fastest woman on water’ – Britain’s premier speedboat-racer, winner of the ...”

“... even had its lost princess when, in the next year, his sister Elizabeth, afterwards known as the Queen of Hearts, married Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, and disappeared into a long and fairly inglorious future. Both events linger on in the shadowy background to Shakespeare’s very late play The Two Noble Kinsmen. This ...”

“... to his first Westminster Parliament in 1604, that he recognised ‘the Roman Church to be our Mother Church, although defiled with some infirmities and corruptions’. But in a later publication, Bedell recalled a conversation in a Venetian stationer’s shop in which a customer had asked what were the differences between the Church of England and the ...”

“... de Valois as director of the Royal Ballet in 1963, saying that he felt ‘like James I succeeding Queen Elizabeth’. Despite the obsession with Fonteyn and Nureyev, he insisted that the company couldn’t be run ‘for the benefit of two people’, and created The Dream in 1964 for Antoinette Sibley and Anthony ...”

“... structure our collective thinking: activity/passivity; sun/moon; culture/nature; day/night; father/mother; head/emotions; logos/pathos. In this list, the second term is considered inferior and is associated with women. Cixous hopes to undo this hierarchy and offers in its place what Toril Moi describes as ‘an invigorating utopian evocation of the imaginative ...”

“... Elidyr had apparently been able to travel to and from this fairyland, until, egged on by his mother, he stole a golden ball that belonged to the fairy king. On his way home he was tripped up by a couple of fairies, who took the ball and vanished. Elidyr was never again able to find his way into fairyland, but in later life he was quizzed by the bishop of ...”

“... the economic life of Stratford’s florists, Shakespeare is nearly as important as St Valentine or Mother – which at the close of their ritual progress from the Birthplace on Henley Street to Holy Trinity Church by the river they will solemnly lay on Shakespeare’s grave, or at least will pass to a parish volunteer nearby, to be added to a pile which must ...”

“... the most famous and most notorious men and women of her day – from Lord Shaftesbury to Queen Caroline, and from Wellington to Fanny Kemble – but in describing them she excelled at the vivid vignette rather than the comprehensive landscape. She pins down Talleyrand at a Tuileries reception, ‘crawling past me ...”

“... aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more to Harpers & Queen. The fashion bubble of Sixties London was not quite the fourth dynasty or the historical watershed of the Crimean War. What was of interest at that time cannot be deduced from Ossie’s frocks any more than the Eighties ...”

“... she sees it) by reference to the psychodrama of his childhood. At 15, Thackeray’s mother, Anne Becher, fell in love with a handsome but penniless young soldier, Lieutenant Henry Carmichael-Smyth. Her family falsely told the infatuated girl that her lover was dead of a sudden fever. Anne was shipped out as sexual cargo to India, where she ...”