“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... such megapearls from the Americas loomed large in the Elizabethan imagination.’ In 1586 alone, Elizabeth I spent £644 on pearls in various shapes and sizes: ‘a sum far surpassing what a wage labourer might make in a lifetime’.While Williams fulminated about Jacobean women appearing at Sunday church services ‘chimera-like: half-male, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his death she had begun to publish work of her own, including a vigorous novel, The Story of Elizabeth. Thackeray’s endorsement was the ground of an indestructible self-belief. Anny never quite outgrew a submissive dedication to his memory, but his death meant liberation. Her breezy assumption that there would always be enough money, with a little left ...”

“... Saturday Night Out of the impenetrable wood Elizabeth Bishop And young girls shall gather to dance on the highways under petals of light that float from their shoulders and dip into lotioned shadows. They shall coil their salty hair and tug at their lapsed muslins as they fall like cushions, and spill. Do they dance for those creatures whose unmade selves come unbuttoning out of the dark? All strop and tang, they crave whatever will settle their erupted frames, their chemical blunders, their overgrown sentences ...”

“... and Yeats (he is writing the authorised biography). Other figures to appear are Trollope and Elizabeth Bowen and Maud Gonne. It is clear that Foster is more interested in posh Protestants than in the members of the Short Strand Martyrs Memorial Flute Band or their like. It is also clear that he does not favour Irish commemorations, even ones which ...”

“... Whig worthies, including George Bubb Dodington, Lord Melcombe, to whom ‘Summer’ was dedicated. Elizabeth Rowe brought Thomson’s poetic achievements to the attention of the Countess of Hertford, Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princess of Wales. Thomson was to enjoy visits to Marlborough Castle with the Earl and Countess of Hertford, and at Dodington’s ...”

“... Civil war is an unpleasant business and the story that unfolds in the letters and diaries of Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, the Canadian diplomat with whom she was in love for more than thirty years, is not a happy one. This was not so much what the publishers are pleased to call on the dust jacket ‘the love affair of a lifetime’, more like a fight to the death ...”

“... own proper limits, and the resilience of Pat Barker’s writing lies in knowing where they lie. Elizabeth Jolley has always dealt shrewdly with the risks and pleasures of fantasy. In The Sugar Mother, she too turns to the familial complications a man might dream up for himself. Edwin Page is an academic, plugging away at English literature in an Australian ...”

“... indicates a high degree of expertise in the author. Ancient Enemies is a new departure for Elizabeth North. She has, before, left tantalising trails of unexpected connections and consequences; she has also, notably in Everything in the Garden, proved that she can produce a masterly pastiche of period speech and behaviour. Here she has done both of ...”

“... these annotations are puzzling: on Palm Sunday, 10 April 1949, Lowell wrote a brief note to Elizabeth Bishop, a sympathetic message to his first wife, Jean Stafford, a weird word or two to a former lover, Gertrude Buckman, a sentence to George Santayana and two sentences to William Carlos Williams. Of these communications, those to Bishop, Buckman and ...”