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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is practically valueless as a psychological document, and not much less so as a factual one. Elizabeth Wilson knows all this as well as anyone. In her own preface to the original 1994 edition of her documentary biography Shostakovich: A Life Remembered she noted that at the end of the 1980s, when she was conducting her researches, glasnost was enabling ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... chief pimp, but was then blindsided by the king’s clandestine marriage to the widowed commoner Elizabeth Woodville, after which Warwick and the Nevilles were frozen out at court.The Woodville marriage was a tipping point. An anointed king of England hadn’t taken one of his own subjects for a wife since before the Norman Conquest, so why did ...”

“... Letitia Elizabeth Landon was one of the 19th century’s most romantic figures. When The Improvisatrice came out in 1824, she was described in the press as the female Byron, the English Sappho and, after the notoriously independent eponymous heroine of Madame de Staël’s novel, the English Corinne. Her ecstatic and melancholic verse appeared to exhibit her own passions in an age when ladies were supposed to keep quiet about such things ...”

“... the tsar’s army and made his way hair-raisingly across Europe to end up in Liverpool. His wife, Elizabeth, no less enterprising, left Ukraine in search of work, also ending up in Liverpool, which is where they met and married. The plan was to emigrate to New York, going by way of Dublin, but when they got to Dublin they decided to settle there. I never knew ...”

“... and she bore it royally. Winston’s flamboyant tribute to ‘the Queens’ (She and her sister Elizabeth): ‘Their service Hastened our haul to victory by a year!’ But dear, oh dear, when Cunard got her back, Her Korkoid floorings marred by a million boots, It also proved that certain servicemen Had carved their callow names on the panellings: ‘Harvey ...”

“... his almanacs to find out what line he should take between the poles of English politics, Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots? My natural bent is to think that he is chatting the man up: I do not find him saying such things in his official correspondence with Paris; nor do I find that on such grounds kings and councillors made their decisions about the ...”

“... wildness of On the Boiler as characteristic of his degraded or defeated intelligence. Now, with Elizabeth Cullingford’s book to aid us, we need no longer be guilty of such facile misreadings. The solid virtues of the book – its exactness of reference, its respect for chronology, its anxiety to provide a context for every text, its emphasis on the ...”