“... of the confessors who accompanied most living saints and acted as witnesses and praise-singers. Elizabeth of Hungary, a historical figure who was canonised four years after her death in 1231 by her friend Pope Gregory IX, was written up by the poet Rutebeuf among others: although she was married (the exception among exemplary women), she also turned her ...”

“... has always been an object of avid attention. ‘My mother captivated by her looks alone, yet what drew most men and women into her orbit at first meeting was her talk.’ About her father Bedford is less secretive and some of the ground covered in A Legacy is rehearsed again here. He, too, had been good-looking (in this novel few people are plain) and was ...”

“... Britain and on the Continent with a succession of séances, two or three of which were attended by Elizabeth and Robert Browning. On the first occasion, an unseen hand lowered a clematis wreath (laurel was hard to come by) on Elizabeth’s brow. She believed in spiritual manifestations, but Robert, though he shared her ...”

“... under his signature. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a small flood of memoirs – of which Elizabeth Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994) was the most notable – and published correspondence and interviews with his friends showed him full of acid-tongued contempt for the stupidities of Soviet bureaucracy. Even the famously patriotic ...”

“... revolution. In February 1652, Parliament, or what was left of it, passed an Act of Oblivion, which drew a line under deeds committed during the civil wars. After a decade of conflict, the elusive goal of moving on seemed achievable, notwithstanding the shattered castles and broken bodies. Domestic peace was coupled with the stirrings of success ...”

“... he had been drawn to Coleridge’s vision of the church universal. The Oxford Movement then drew him towards high-church practice and belief, until the shock of the first conversions to Roman Catholicism’ – this was an Irish Anglican – ‘turned his path back towards the Broad Church.’ Hankins carefully charts these private movements of the ...”

“... popularised the term, ‘seraphick love’ with Anne Russell (whom he dubbed ‘Platona’) and Elizabeth Carey (who became his ‘Electra’). It is exceptionally hard to describe what Evelyn felt for these women: probably it is best to say that the concept of platonic love enabled this socially awkward and excessively serious man to talk easily and ...”

“... as anything else, she married Edwin Rollins, a white, gay legal aid lawyer; they had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan.In January 1964 Negro Digest published ‘Suffer the Children’, inspired by the racist bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama the previous year, which had killed four girls. It was an elegy rather than a ...”

“... The birth​ of Queen Elizabeth II’s second and, by court rumour, favourite son was attended by a bad fairy. A spell, with emphatic italics for second, was derived from a shuffled conjuring of newspaper reports. The conjurer, a person of many masks and disguises, was hiding out in a Left Bank ghost hotel and wielding his Stanley knife like one of those crazy surgeons in a routine by William Burroughs ...”

“... to Austin, and, to a lesser extent, her sister, Lavinia; her love of the Book of Revelation, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontës, George Eliot and a sentimental writer who went by the name of Ik Marvel; her passionate friendship with Susan Gilbert Dickinson, whom Austin married after a difficult courtship and who thereafter lived next door to ...”

“... charge of her life by adopting a series of masks. Taking a cue from a distinction Kemble herself drew between her ‘dramatic’ mother and her ‘theatrical’ father, David argues that the grown woman sought to control her maternal inheritance by imitating her father’s professional discipline: while the ‘dramatic’ in Kemble’s terms was ...”

“... Others are more awkward and sometimes ill-judged, such as the digression in the letter from Elizabeth, who becomes Frankenstein’s wife, to Frankenstein about the place of Justine Moritz in their family: The republican institutions of our country have produced simpler and happier manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround ...”

“... as they could, but the argument they deduced from the buildings and sculpture they measured and drew was primarily aesthetic. They were pursuing ‘the study of architecture’, and the argument of The Antiquities of Athens was about taste, specifically that the ‘true Taste and Elegance’ of Greek art were superior to the ‘ruined Edifices of Rome’ as ...”

“... can be as light on their poetical feet as Herrick, who was dubbed ‘the Ariel of poets’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He refers to both music and his own verse as ‘enchantments’ as though he did indeed learn from Ariel’s blend of magic and song. But he was a far more sociable poet than the lonely Ariel. Many of his pieces – and again this is a ...”

“... saw his surprise, “always puts a bunch of real ones among the fake pour attraper le client. You drew the joker.”’ This extraordinary scene is intensely, and regressively, allegorical. It matters, perhaps, that the term mimesis has an ancient connection to a type of flower (the mimosa’s contortions when touched were said in Aristotle’s time to mimic ...”