“... called ‘one of the best documented attacks of flatulence in history’) to sex.He had married Elizabeth de St Michel when he was 22 years old; she was 14, young even by the standard of the time. We don’t know how they met. Her father was French, and she had grown up in Paris and Devon. She was a Protestant, though when she was angry at her husband she ...”

“... against the severity of much Henrician legislation, sodomy was reinstated as a felony under Elizabeth in 1563, allegedly in response to an increase of the practice. Elizabethan censorship, especially of stage plays, was strict. It is astonishing in retrospect that Marlowe should have been able to present the erotic feelings of one man for another so ...”

“... tenderness for her memory: ‘If ever I were to wish for a heaven, it would be that I might meet Elizabeth again there ... I love my present wife dearly, but there is something about me in relation to my first wife, the wife of my youth, who grew up with me.’ This is also Victorian, perhaps more so than the stereotypically ‘Victorian’ low voltage of ...”

“... Connect’: but Lodge’s principal model is not Howards End, still less Hard Times, but Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. Robyn and Vic, the Naive but Socially-Conscious Heroine and the Rough-Edged Manufacturer, are brought together by the unlikely device of Industry Year, which decrees that Robyn shall spend one day a week at Pringle’s ...”

“... traditional Republican leaders (exemplified by the much-married Senator Warner, former husband of Elizabeth Taylor). Under a multi-party system, as in Europe or Japan, the displaced traditional Republicans would now form their own socially liberal, economically conservative party. But even under a two-party system, the cohabitation of incompatible groups ...”

“... chewing-gum dispenser) than from the work of his predecessors in art. As it happened, his sister Elizabeth was thought to be the artistic member of the family. She was sent to take painting classes with Edward Hopper, the son of the man who owned the local dry goods store. Joseph preferred to stay at home, immersed in Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers ...”

“... such working-class heroes as Frank Little and Big Bill Haywood of the IWW, the Communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Louis Tikas (a union leader gunned down in John D. Rockefeller Jr’s ‘Ludlow Massacre’ of striking copper miners and their families), but also recognises the corporate and state industrial violence and denial of labour freedom that ...”

“... might have taken his ten-year-old son to Coventry to see the entertainments laid on for Queen Elizabeth is firmly quashed (there’s no evidence for any such excursion and Tudor family life wasn’t like that), and, as if as an emblem of the fate of all such sweetly decorative fancies, even Schoenbaum’s account of the pretty bedroom walls at the Oxford ...”

“... might have occurred. Could it be that we are in the world described in Lord of the Flies, or in Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee’s latest novel, where the protagonist proposes that there are no laws for the prisoner of war who ‘does not belong to our tribe. We can do what we want with him … cut his throat, tear out his heart, throw him on the ...”

“... and his songs are glittering with cribs from everything he ever loved, from A Taste of Honey, from Elizabeth Smart, from Karel Reisz’s films, everything, including (especially) the Kitchen Sink, jokes nipped from Oscar Wilde, Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood. He loved to do versions of his favourite songs by Twinkle and Cilla Black and even by brand new bands ...”

“... lavish and well reproduced (with the sole exception of the portrait of the Moorish ambassador to Elizabeth I following preliminary page 64, a painting which hangs in the Shakespeare Institute and was long rumoured to have been the source for the cut of its former director Stanley Wells’s beard; for some reason this picture looks slightly out of focus, as ...”

“... Argus. His childhood was privileged and isolated; in 1953, aged eight, he was taken on the Queen Elizabeth to see the Coronation. Argus was rich, powerful and ‘fundamentally dishonest’, with the directors regularly trading in assets which they bought from and sold to the company, always at a profit to themselves. Black’s father was one of the six main ...”

“... a rendition of the Sam and Dave song ‘Soul Man’, only Dole Man sounded more like Dull Man.Elizabeth Mitchell, known as Biz, John’s number two at George, suggested one evening that we drive half an hour north to Escondido, where Pat Buchanan, who had lost the nomination to Dole, was holding his convention-in-defeat. His guests included Oliver ...”

“... inflicted a sort of apartheid on the Welsh. Far larger plantations were to follow in Munster under Elizabeth, then in Ulster in the 1600s, where more than a hundred thousand people, many of them Lowland Scots, were settled on land vacated by the flight of the Catholic earls. ‘Settled’ was never more of a euphemism. From that day to this, there has been ...”

“... costs, have been growing faster than wages.Tillett lived with his father, Benjamin (his mother, Elizabeth, died when he was three), and his seven siblings. His family also rented out a room. A house on the street where Tillett was born now sells for between £300,000 and £500,000. In 2021, 55 per cent of households in Easton owned the accommodation they ...”