“... in part, for Chapman’s Achilles, was executed in 1601 after his ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth I; Henry, Prince of Wales, the dedicatee of the Odyssey, died in 1612 at the age of 18. Chapman kept plugging away. The extended genesis of Chapman’s Homer is one of its defining and most frequently neglected features. Many modern translations try to ...”

“... to go hungry, but even on the transitional Phase 2 of the South Beach regime you can tuck into Elizabeth Barlow’s Veal Moutarde 4-Pax (from the Blue Door at Delano, ‘one of Miami Beach’s hottest destination resorts’) or a beet, red pepper, pecan and Kalamata olive salad (from Scott Fredel and J.D. Harris’s Rumi Supper Club, ‘a destination where ...”

“... by the Roman Church; the most salient example would have been Pius V’s excommunication of Queen Elizabeth in 1570, which put English Catholics like Donne’s family in the dangerous position of having to choose between their sovereign and their pope. It may seem surprising that Donne felt able to handle such weighty matters in this off-hand way, given his ...”

“... crusader’. The DA also took two large metropolitan areas, one that includes Port Elizabeth, the other Pretoria. Johnson saw this coming, but he doesn’t think much of the DA. He makes the astonishing assertion that the party regards appointments on merit as ‘racist’ (he must mean that the DA was in the process of rolling out a ...”

“... capable of becoming mantras of a sophisticated sort, gaining power from repeated contemplation. Elizabeth Hardwick’s ‘coolly composed sentences’, for instance, gave Dillon something to hang on to, ‘but there was enough about them of intentional disarray that I felt as though in her essayism she understood extremes.’ He makes a meal of one ...”

“... of the canon, and wondered, to take one example, why Brendan Behan should be preferred over Elizabeth Bowen. Maybe Bowen wouldn’t look right on a pub wall. She seems to be not just the wrong gender but also the wrong class, the wrong religion. This sense of wrongness doesn’t adhere to Synge, Beckett, Swift, Goldsmith, O’Casey, Yeats, Shaw, or ...”

“... in South Carolina, Florida and near Rio de Janeiro. English navigators were eager to join in, but Elizabeth I wasn’t much interested: since England was fighting Spain, as it was from 1585 till the end of her reign, it could pinch treasure from Spanish ships rather than scratching around in foreign lands looking for gold and pearls and dodging ...”

“... from immune to the romance of Irish insurrection. When Maxwell suggested she read the Anglo-Irish Elizabeth Bowen, Brennan took back, without a word, a favourite portrait of Colette that she had hung behind his desk. Later, visiting London, she was ‘outraged’ to find that the only available map of the city was ‘the one with the “Bastion of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with fetching water, and the records of coroners’ inquests are strewn with the consequences. Elizabeth Wilkinson, aged four, was sent to fill a cup of water from the pond at the back of the house and drowned; William Kembold, six, to draw water from the River Brett; and on and on, in a long roster of sorrow. Older children were bidden to do more ...”

“... 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 ...”