“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... whales: ‘Perhaps whales sing sagas of great acts of sacrifice by whale cows of days gone by.’ Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who is a splendid storyteller and has some splendid stories to tell, also wishes to persuade us that we have underestimated the analogies between humans and animals and, because her accounts are so circumstantial, she often ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Scottish Crown. He was now dependent for petty cash on his annual ‘gratuity’ from Elizabeth I, and his future was effectively mortgaged on his succession to the English throne. James notoriously showed no interest in martial matters of any kind, with the exception of the few brief and almost bloodless campaigns against rebels in Scotland ...”

“... can’t quite be realised and can’t quite be discarded. At Melbourne airport, Dexter runs into Elizabeth, an older version of Monkey Grip’s Nora, a woman who once ‘lay on his bed, in college, a whole Saturday afternoon waiting for him to come back because she wanted to fuck somebody and at the time there was no one else’. She appears to him now as ...”

“... of 1986,’ and outlines a programme: presentation of the Domesday facsimile to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Courts of Justice (Her Majesty will not lack for Domesday Books by the end of the year); jousting in Regents Park and Norwich; Domesday weeks in London, Winchester, Norwich and other historic towns; traditional mayor-making ceremony in ...”

“... later work, to the older authorial convention of a time-free consciousness. As a pre-war writer Elizabeth Bowen made gestures towards the Modern but preferred her own pattern of individualities. She was not much of a theorist, though she liked to advance her ideas on fiction boldly and with a certain panache, in what she would have described as a ...”

“... current Brechtology has a subject, it is Brecht’s relationship to that process. Elizabeth Wright’s Post-Modern Brecht (1989) sought simply to claim him as an embryonic Post-Modernist, on the superficially bizarre basis that the Marxist-Leninist playwright was ‘sceptical of what Lyotard called the great narrative, the great danger, the ...”

“... lower-class material. He had two star performers, teenage Irish maidservants called Jane and Elizabeth O’Key, who were in the hospital for hysteria and epilepsy. During their fits both tended to go into confused states in which they appeared to assume alternative personalities. Over months of demonstrations, it began to seem as though it was the ...”

“... in the whole of England and Wales. At least as important, she formed a life-long friendship with Elizabeth Macadam, a strong, independent Scot who was to share her houses and be her main emotional support through life. Pedersen deals sensitively and well with this relationship as far as she is able – for both women went to extraordinary lengths to destroy ...”