“... you on the highways and byways. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with.’ Or Elizabeth Smith, the Scottish-born wife of a Wicklow landlord: ‘The Irish landlord is in no essential different from the Irish peasant – his superior position has raised him in many points above his labouring countryman but the character of this race is ...”

“... and dark is the abyss of the theatre.’ On the night his play closed James wrote to the actress Elizabeth Robins: ‘It has been a great relief to feel that one of the most detestable incidents of my life has closed.’ On 22 February he wrote to his brother: ‘Oscar Wilde’s farce which followed Guy Domville is, I believe, a great success – and with ...”

“... makes it immaterial. In an enchanting piece in the People in 1950, a New Zealand journalist called Elizabeth Parsons quizzed ‘Britain’s three most eligible bachelors’ about what they might be looking for in a wife. The bachelors are Ivor Novello, Terence Rattigan and Norman Hartnell. Parsons catches Novello in his dressing room applying his make-up ...”

“... biography, in circumstances that are severally illuminating.In November 1933, writing to Elizabeth Bowen, he advanced in capsule form his two chief propositions or preoccupations: I quote Ignatieff’s summary:The philosopher Malebranche had observed that since the moral ends which human beings commonly pursued were in conflict with each other, the ...”

“... brick bungalows for the elderly, grouped around a garden with a fountain and a bronze sculpture by Elizabeth Frink, The Blind Beggar and His Dog. The toylike bungalows are superficially so different from the beige and green high rises behind them that you might assume they had nothing to do with each other, yet they were part of the plan from the ...”

“... into Eliot’s orbit was consistent with her being so far away, and distance was what he craved. Elizabeth Bowen summarised an evening at home with the Eliots in August 1932 as ‘two highly nervous people shut up together in grinding proximity’. When he accepted the invitation to give the Norton lectures, he was thrown by the thought that being on the ...”

“... a piece in the New Statesman about Ezra Pound. It was very lively so he was recruited.He wrote on Elizabeth Bishop and Richard Wilbur for the ‘Review’. And on Lowell?No, I don’t think on Lowell, but he wrote well on those two and others. He wrote various things in the later issues. I’d certainly moved to London by then. We’d published about, I ...”

“... the medical profession. In a 2020 article in the Journal of Medical Ethics on no-blame culture, Elizabeth Duthie and her co-authors wrote about a ‘real-life example’ of a nurse who met a patient’s family after she had made a mistake. The nurse was ‘remorseful, traumatised’, though the error had led to ‘no harm’; the patient’s wife was ...”

“... of the Queen Mother; George VI attended her wedding. Marten’s father had been a page to Queen Elizabeth II. The papers ran stories about the once carefree aristocrat who had grown up on the £34 million Crichel Estate in Dorset but had suddenly cut off all contact with her family and friends, and dropped out of her course at East 15 Acting ...”

“... and said goodbye. The first long season of mourning was over and a new darkness lay ahead. Elizabeth Campbell talking to a member of the public in September 2017. On​ Monday, 11 December 2017, on Radio 4’s Today programme, it was made clear to Elizabeth Campbell, the new leader of Kensington and Chelsea ...”