“... in economics. Why the economic failures? Part of the answer is to be found between the lines of Elizabeth Durbin’s important and absorbing study of the ‘New’ Fabian economists of the Thirties, who tried to hammer out an intellectually respectable economic strategy for a future Labour government, in place of the mish-mash of Utopian aspirations and ...”

“... to bed. One reason people kept their clothes on is that they were almost never alone. In 1674 Elizabeth Myres, like many servants, slept in a truckle-bed at the foot of her mistress’s bed. When her mistress took a lover it was Elizabeth’s job to help him pull off his shoes, after which he would climb into her ...”

“... Cambridge; George VI by J.R.M. Butler of Trinity College, Cambridge; and the Queen as Princess Elizabeth by Sir Henry Marten of Eton. Time for a change? Lady Longford gives us to understand that Prince Charles is an expert on the subject, as he probably needs be in self-defence; it is to be hoped that he has supplemented these studies by meditation on the ...”

“... constantly to flatten himself into a cartoon. We come to understand why Keats was fond of him and Elizabeth Barrett admired him, as well as the reasons his son despised him and his painting failed. Even so, Haydon is not the hero, or even quite the centre of the book. A Sultry Month is a demonstration of how martyrdom takes place in a corner. We see exactly ...”

“... On Valentine’s Day​ 1661 Elizabeth Pepys and her husband, Sam, rose early and walked from their house behind the Tower of London down Seething Lane. They were to visit one of Sam’s superiors, William Batten, surveyor of the navy. The custom was that women should take the first man they saw as their Valentine, so long as he was no relation ...”

“... The new Pickering and Chatto edition of the complete works of Elizabeth Gaskell arrived just in time to mark a century since the publication of the previous standard text, A.W. Ward’s Knutsford Edition of 1906. In the meantime, Gaskell has been transformed from a charming woman who wrote wry nostalgic sketches to a major figure in Victorian studies ...”

“... In 1623, English foreign policy was dominated by one issue: the Palatinate. James I’s daughter Elizabeth had in 1613 married the Protestant Frederick, the elector palatine. In 1619 the Bohemian estates chose Frederick as king of Bohemia, and in the process ousted Archduke Ferdinand, who was a particularly devout and intolerant Catholic. Unfortunately for ...”

“... note the effect of women poets upon the major males. To take a single example, in his printing of Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s ‘Upon the Death of her Husband’ as taken from the second edition of ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, he encourages the inference that Pope’s ‘Eloisa’ is alluded to in half-quotation in Rowe’s poem. That is a mistaken inference. Pope ...”

“... Having reached​ the grand age of 14, Elizabeth Barrett peered back into the distant past. She recorded in her journal that, when she was nine, ‘works of imagination only afforded me gratification and I trod the delightful fields of fancy without any of those conscientious scruples which now always attend me when wasting time in frivolous pleasure ...”

“... for only a few months of lectures at UCL. (One part of the dazzlement of his flight to Italy with Elizabeth Barrett two decades later was that he was at last leaving home.) In his twenties he wrote Pauline, Paracelsus and Sordello: all long, and all clad in the vesture of prestigious genres handed down from the Romantics; the poems are, respectively, a ...”

“... of them, who survived long enough to tell and tell again the shocking truth, for example, that Elizabeth Arden, one of the world’s richest women, lined the inside of her shoes with newspaper, or that Helena Rubinstein’s lawyer chose ‘the budget option’ at the funeral parlour after her death until wiser counsel prevailed, or that Diana Vreeland’s ...”

“... In April​ 1970, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick – both aged 53, married for 21 years – had just been on holiday together in Italy with their 13-year-old daughter, Harriet. Hardwick and Harriet had come home to New York, where Hardwick taught at Barnard College; Lowell had gone to Oxford to take up a fellowship at All Souls ...”

“... honesty of that remark shows just how far, in the post-Drabble-Byatt novel, the process has gone. Elizabeth Bowen or Elizabeth Taylor ignored, in their individual ways, all idea of being ‘women novelists’, as Anita Brookner does today. However ‘feminine’ their subject-matter, they don’t approach it determinedly as ...”

“... palely illumined in a memoir by his former foreign minister, the erstwhile Vogue model, Princess Elizabeth of Toro. In this extraordinary account of her life we move from the feudal monarchy of Uganda to independence, coup, the vengeful paranoia of a dictator, his overthrow, and the bungling reimposition of the despot Amin had displaced – to the great joy ...”

“... No one knows what a literary ambition I had, nor how my failure has broken me,’ Elizabeth Stoddard wrote in 1876. She was 53, and knew she was not going to be numbered among the great American writers of her generation. The gloomy and self-dramatising tone is characteristic. In fact she was exceptionally robust, and nothing could break her ...”