“... windows. What bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal Theatre was giving a premiere, a ...”

“... he is saved, as Frederick had been saved by the sudden death of his arch-enemy the Empress Elizabeth of Russia. This clutch of a precedent shows an almost pathetic stupidity – and the paranoiac’s ignorance of and separation from the realities of the outside world. Yet Hitler had once been truly a part of that world, and of the German and European ...”

“... are described as having been wiped out, but then they reappear, only to be wiped out again.Queen Elizabeth managed to suppress the humiliating failure of Drake’s Counter-Armada to Coruña and Lisbon in 1589 so brilliantly that for three centuries no Englishman was aware of it – though English losses were far worse than Spanish losses had been the year ...”

“... non-places kept in a persistent vegetative state, like the Gothic mass of the neighbouring Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in Hackney Road, until the right development package comes along. And meanwhile spiders knit their spectral nets. Shivering phantoms stand before empty mirrors in white-tiled washrooms where the taps leak coal ...”

“... who has had plenty of time to think, but it can be indolent to the point of nervelessness. Thus of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet, he remarks: So far as I can see on an exceedingly cloudy day, I wouldn’t say she is particularly gifted as an actress. She seems, rather, to turn things off and on, much as she is told, with perhaps a fair amount of natural ...”

“... and ugly dog-ears stuck on at either end – a foretaste of the disaster inside. By the time Queen Elizabeth inaugurated the Opera House on 20 October 1973, the final cost was A$102 million (then £51 million) of which 75 per cent was spent after Utzon’s departure, often exceeding the lottery income. George Molnar, a lecturer in architecture and a Sydney ...”

“... mass of richest spices, putrified into a dunghill’), and advised Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett and Alfred Tennyson to give up poetry and write prose instead. Not only his contemporaries fell short. Milton was guilty of unsystematic reasoning (‘It is quite clear that he never studied mathematics very deeply, or political economy – or ...”

“... interesting connection comes via the marriage, in the early 1570s, of his older brother William to Elizabeth Stafford. She was the sister of Sir Edward Stafford, who later became English Ambassador in France. Here is a hitherto unknown dimension to Thomas Drury: he is a brother-in-law of that most conspiratorial of ambassadors, whose house in Paris was a ...”

“... surveyed by drones, or hard-hat visionaries in helicopters, from heights where even the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park looks great, is only there to be explained, improved, colonised and captured. So? So? So what?So when I think I’m moving across a city of memories, where I have lived and worked for fifty years, I find that, very soon, I lose the markers ...”

“... as Jenny Diski noted in What I Don’t Know about Animals (2010). People need to eat, and even Elizabeth Costello carried a leather handbag, and anyway, veggiebragging is boring and self-obsessed. Worse than that, it’s sentimental – like pro-Life-ism, with which Haraway draws a parallel – and a cover for cruelty (forcing a woman to give birth to a ...”

“... metropolitan area and on the south coast.Every time I take the long escalator down to the Elizabeth Line, or contemplate the implications of our compulsive burrowing into the radiant future promised by developers, I wonder about the psychic damage being inflicted on London as a living organism. ‘Intercept, store and ultimately transfer’ is the ...”

“... burden on common definitions. But even here acute problems arise. The England of Edward I and of Elizabeth I was one country: but was it really the same kind of society, within the terms of the taxonomy itself, when villeinage had disappeared between the two? Sung China was a contemporary of Norman Sicily, and Runciman judges them absolutist alike. But where ...”

“... biography. Zirker’s volume includes seven works, one of which, ‘A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning’ (1753), concerns the well-known case which provided the basis for Josephine Tey’s novel The Franchise Affair. The Covent-Garden Journal (1752) is the last of Fielding’s major works of journalism, and perhaps the most interesting to ...”

“... is to a 17th-century Savile and his son and daughter-in-law, done by Maximilian Colt who sculpted Elizabeth I’s monument in Westminster Abbey. Elsewhere in the church are two faceless reclining figures and, acting as corbels, some huge grotesque stone heads. I don’t take much notice of these but it turns out that these carvings are why the church is ...”

“... argues –is both remembering lines he wrote perhaps ten years earlier in the reign of Elizabeth, and also recalling performances by the actors who spoke his lines. He seems to be drawing on nature for his conceit, but equally he is drawing on the created nature of his own art. The young man is a flawed, brilliant royal actor, and he is also an ...”