“... 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 ...”

“... buy into the Protestant project of the last of the Tudors, and yet was still the chief ornament of Elizabeth’s Chapel Royal. Sharpe is as concerned to represent those disloyal to the dynasty as he is its supporters. In reality, 16th-century people did not normally think of ‘the Tudors’ or ‘the Tudor Age’. They thought of Henry VIII and his ...”

“... wanted produced the forgeries of William-Henry Ireland in the 1790s (which included a letter from Elizabeth I thanking him for his ‘prettye Verses’) and John Payne Collier in the 1830s and 1840s (which showed Shakespeare to have been a well-connected member of metropolitan literary circles from an early stage). But for Shapiro the real villain is Edmond ...”

“... Prix de Flore, which rewards younger, avant-garde-ish writers. Hate is the story of four people: Elizabeth Levallois, the narrator, a cultural journalist at Libération; her long-term lover, a married media academic called Jean-Michel Leibowitz; her friend Dominique Rossi, a gay activist; and William Miller, an unbalanced young man who is Dominique’s lover ...”

“... There are tales of miraculous conceptions, like that of Sarah, who conceived Isaac at 90, and Elizabeth, who, according to Luke, conceived John, later the Baptist, in old age. Here Luke obviously had his eye on Sarah and also liked the symmetry between Elizabeth, very old, and Mary, about 12 or 13, both pregnant in ...”