“... correspondent, the role of chief Hollywood inquisitor was assumed by the more combative Julia Elizabeth Baxter. Ellen Scott’s researches in the NAACP archive have revealed that Baxter paid greater attention than White had to the racial caricature latent in cinema’s visual and verbal detail. It would be interesting to know what she made of the ...”

“... or should they make us notice the artistry of the many pages scribbled in airports? In a review of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters, Heaney’s Field Day colleague Tom Paulin argued that ‘a poetics does operate when we read a letter,’ but that ‘the gifted correspondent has to appear negligent of effect.’ What successful letters show is ‘a rejection of ...”

“... Cartier-Bresson. He flirted with the idea of moving to New York, after falling in love with Sara Elizabeth Penn, a glamorous Black expatriate he met at a party. In 1957, Penn returned to New York, and waited for him to arrive.He never did. Late that year, he received a visit from Annette Roger, a doctor from Marseille who was active in the porteurs de ...”

“... Oxford don Edmund Campion. Before he converted from Protestantism, he had mightily impressed Queen Elizabeth with his rhetorical performance on her visit to the university, but after his well-publicised return to England on mission he was hanged, drawn and quartered on Elizabeth’s authority in 1581, having refused all ...”

“... reflected a nationally binding experience of the new religion after the settlement of 1559. Had Elizabeth I opened windows into men’s souls, she would have found that for every orthodox Protestant or sceptical Catholic there were thousands who embraced a mishmash of religion and magic, rituals and spells, theological oddments and garbled prayers. ‘For ...”

“... in one of the very few ships leaving from Port Said. Micheline got berths on the troopship Queen Elizabeth. On 18 July, she left with her daughters from Cairo’s central station. It was a madhouse, the platforms were crammed with every sort of refugee, desperate to attach themselves to any part of a train, including the roof. Many of them were Jews who had ...”

“... that tended to come and go, and which was never on view when, as often used to happen, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother dropped in for tea. There was not much about the royal family to which Sir Claude had not been privy. After his service with George V he had been briefly in the household of Edward VIII and moved smoothly on into the service of his ...”

“... Wales being no stranger to hopefulness of that sort either. The King and Queen, with Princess Elizabeth, sailed out for the Coronation Naval Review in May 1937. Commander T. Woodroffe made a live radio broadcast from the event, which was much listened to, and much remembered, for relaying this, the last of the grand naval spectacles before the war. It is ...”

“... Jack wrote in the ‘Unbelievable!’ issue of Granta dedicated in part to Diana’s death. For Elizabeth Wilson, in ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Diana’ in New Left Review, Diana’s mythic status put paid to any feminist component of her story (as if the two were incompatible). The Left is the last bastion of a form of reason dangerously discredited in ...”

“... the limits of the empiricism prevalent in England then as now. ‘Already in the time of Queen Elizabeth,’ Count Keyserling wrote in Europe (1928), ‘the German spirit ... was to the respectable Britisher a horrid spectre; even then intelligence as such was already regarded as an unhealthy product made in Germany.’ There we see the spirit of ...”

“... invert the given limitations of the form, subduing the obtrusive repetition until it is invisible. Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’ is one perfect example. The other is Kipling’s ‘Sestina of the Tramp-Royal’. The strict, cramped, formal demands of the sestina are belied by the unbuttoned dialect and its illusion of relaxation and ...”

“... to have tried to replace her (‘he looked for a surrogate mother in every relationship,’ says Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be ...”

“... executions would promote anti-American sentiment and disrupt the ‘Anglo-American accord’. On Elizabeth II’s first outing after her coronation, she saw a ‘Save the Rosenbergs’ banner draped on the Monument to the Great Fire of London. Two thousand demonstrators in Calcutta protested outside the US embassy; in Paris, tens of thousands marched on the ...”

“... who were willing to risk their lives in a desperate crusade,’ Wisner’s daughter, the historian Elizabeth Hazard, would write, ‘but its policies had subverted the possibility of an early detente with the Soviet Union.’In March 1957, back in Washington, Wisner offered to direct an operation to overthrow President Sukarno of Indonesia. It ended, Anderson ...”

“... instructor for the Coast Guard, and the boy’s first nine years were spent in the port town of Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His mother, Wendy, was descended from two passengers on the Mayflower: Priscilla Mullins, ‘the only single woman of marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony’, and the ship’s cooper, John ...”