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“... in extreme lighting. In the 1940s, it’s the princesses who get the baroque-deco treatment: Elizabeth and Margaret half-drowned in sudsy blossom, or the future queen in three-quarter-length profile and spangled dress, a mere formal excuse for an assemblage of gleaming furniture and gilt picture frames. In 1953, Beaton fretted in his diary that he might ...”

“... the reality: £4 billion over budget for Crossrail is a parsimonious bargain for the rebranded Elizabeth Line. This money is flighty, but it is very serious. It maps the territory where we might be able to pick up the threads of the General Theory of Everything. A lot of people are talking, releasing statements, providing updates, playing themselves in ...”

“... Elizabeth Hardwick​ was wary of biographers. She called life-writing ‘a scrofulous cottage industry’, a ‘consistent fiction’ masquerading as truth. Its practitioners were necrophiliacs ‘quick in pursuit of the dead’. In her book on Herman Melville, she wrote of the ‘violent exuberance’ that accompanied his rediscovery by critics in the 1920s: ‘He was unearthed … the whole skeleton, as it were, put under the floodlights, a penetrating radar giving the bones a voluptuous rebirth ...”

“... House of Stairs by Barbara Vine (the pseudonym of the crime writer Ruth Rendell), whose narrator Elizabeth Vetch has in the 1980s to deal with a friend, Bell Sanger, who has served a ‘life sentence’ for a late Sixties murder and come out again. Murderers used to be hanged. Now they are set free and come back to live among us. Or to exist. I look at ...”

“... Browning (re)constructed a classical epic in 12 books, a ‘novel-poem’ to rival his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, a historical romance to challenge Scott, an urban realist fiction to emulate Dickens or Balzac, a religio-philosophical-aesthetic treatise in the modern vein of the Higher Criticism. From the 1830s he had been a ...”

“... distanced, but only by a margin, from the French mignon. Sir Robert Naunton famously insisted that Elizabeth I’s ministers were ‘only favourites, not minions’. Was her first minister for much of the reign, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, such a favourite? In this volume, Paul Hammer distinguishes his position from that of a courtier-favourite such ...”

“... is used elsewhere in Sense and Sensibility and in Austen’s next novel, Pride and Prejudice. When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Mr Darcy’s proposal, she nonetheless finds herself gratified ‘to have inspired unconsciously so strong an affection’. To be ‘unconscious’ is simply not to notice something in the world around you. Then, in Mansfield Park, these ...”

“... readers, who can’t bear the chill that emanates from these works, especially Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005). The same chill can be picked up in Coetzee’s critical essays, where it is likely to appear as offhand authority. A poem by Paul Celan, we learn in the collection Inner Workings, ‘absorbs from the Surrealists ...”

“... Thomas Seymour, the Lord Protector’s brother, and his marital designs on the 15-year-old Lady Elizabeth, the future (Protestant) queen. She is disliked by the Lord Protector, who favours her elder half-sister, Lady Mary, the future (Catholic) queen. William Cecil, a rising royal secretary, is protective towards ...”

“... 400th anniversary of Hilliard’s death this year has been marked by the publication of Elizabeth Goldring’s impeccably researched new biography, and by an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Elizabethan Treasures, featuring ninety works by Hilliard and Oliver, accompanied by an excellent catalogue by Catharine MacLeod.* Both books are ...”

“... anyone other than the men whom they eventually marry. Even if her family is incredulous, we share Elizabeth Bennet’s ‘absolute certainty’ by the end of Pride and Prejudice (1813) that Mr Darcy’s affection ‘was not the work of a day, but had stood the test of many months’. We are also likely to suspect, quite some time before Emma, that ‘Mr ...”

“... of independence, reasonable hours and professionalism. The day of the comic female clerk, like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Miss Galindo, is, of course, for the New Woman, in the dark past. Monica does not finish the course; it was absurd to talk to her about business. She makes a rash marriage, which turns out disastrously. The moral of the Maddens is that not ...”

“... Elizabeth Jane Howard had been a novelist for forty years before she published The Light Years, the first volume of the Cazalet chronicles, in 1990. The fifth and final volume, All Change, was published in 2013, and she died in January this year, aged ninety. Her stepson Martin Amis advised her to embark on the Cazalet books, when she was hesitating between possibilities ...”

“... his setting his own words to music. ‘Klage an das Volk’ is the last of his poems to survive. Elizabeth Norman McKay, in her biography of Schubert, describes it as a summary of his thoughts about the decline in aesthetic standards in Vienna at the time (1824). My translation sticks as far as possible to the stanza shape, rhyme scheme and metre of ...”

“... McCarthy pointed out waspishly that the great Parisienne was no more than an appendage to Sartre. Elizabeth Hardwick took a higher tone, at least as sarcastically described by Lowell, who wrote in 1953: Elizabeth has just finished a wonderful crucifying polemic on the Second Sexe. She proves with all the eloquence of ...”