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“... tend to accept their condition in life as given – like the dogs whose experience of the world Elizabeth Marshall Thomas attempted to share, imagining it as utterly free of boredom ... the hypothetical inhabitants of a world without the notion of boredom – they’re not dogs, after all – invoke categories other than those of feeling to assess their ...”

“... novelist Bryher (Winifred Ellerman) and sixty to Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), who was Bryher’s lover. Elizabeth Bishop, a favourite in later years, received more than two hundred, over a period of almost forty years. Faced with such abundance the editors have had to make severe choices, and have occasionally and understandably made cuts in letters they did ...”

“... time an English monarch had visited since Richard II in 1399. The marriage of James’s daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, in 1613 was the first royal wedding in England since Mary Tudor’s in 1554. It cost James £93,000 and a terminal headache, since the couple’s acceptance of the crown of Bohemia from Protestant rebels in 1619 ...”

“... the play in question was not Shakespeare’s at all). Shapiro then glances at the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, and considers, finally, Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical immortality. This phenomenon, we are again assured, is emphatically not the result of any desire or ability to transcend his own times: ‘He understood his age perfectly, and the ...”

“... who became his mistress, partly because of her talents on the stage. He worked closely with Elizabeth Gaskell and the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts. The distress of abused and vulnerable women moved him to pity, and he made energetic attempts to lift prostitutes out of wretchedness, with Burdett-Coutts’s help. He couldn’t tolerate women ...”

“... thing to be brought up in the Patriot din of Liberty and property and to be allow’d neither?’ Elizabeth Robinson inquired as a young woman. As Mrs Montagu, she would eventually acquire a considerable measure of both – but only after the death of the man by whose name she has since been known to posterity. None of the women Syliva Myers includes in the ...”

“... his response to the felt pressures of both private readers (notably, though not exclusively, Elizabeth Barrett) and public critics. It is this element of ‘interaction’, Woolford argues, which represented, in Browning’s own eyes, ‘his revision of Romantic poetics, and stimulated his progressive revision of poetic form’ (‘progressive’ here ...”

“... snob in us and, for some, that will be a greater appeal. Most readers, though, will react like Elizabeth Bishop: And here I must confess (and I imagine most of your contemporaries would confess the same thing) that I am green with envy of your kind of assurance. I feel I could write in as much detail about my Uncle Artie, say, – but what would be the ...”

“... during the Queen’s visit to South Africa, about black radio commentators who talked of ‘Queen Elizabeth Eleven’ and her husband, the ‘Duke of Ellington’. The people who told you the stories were always white and they had never heard the commentator themselves; either ‘a friend’ had, or they’d ‘heard’ that it had happened, thus confirming ...”

“... the triple-decker cake with the solitary little sugar bride on top – for his description of Elizabeth Bishop: she is ‘the poets’ poets’ poet’. It sounds farcical, but it’s strictly true, and there’s as little getting round it as there is improving on it. As I begin, therefore, I feel stirrings of a wholly impersonal desire maybe to pan ...”

“... and Geoffrey set out in his car to report the matter to the police in Kitale, taking four-year-old Elizabeth with him. Helen gave him a memorandum for the DC, ‘as he could never remember’. At her trial one throwaway sentence in the memo was to prove damning: ‘I have had them beaten.’ Once in Kitale, Geoffrey, without his wife’s knowledge, withdrew ...”

“... recently been published, together with some of her poems, in Telling the Truth about Jerusalem, Elizabeth Wilson has recently produced Hidden Agendas, and Cora Kaplan’s collection from a ten-year period has just appeared in Sea Changes. Germaine Greer’s Madwoman’s Underclothes, designed, according to the dust-jacket, to demonstrate ‘what a force in ...”

“... of industrial archaeology, a father/daughter relationship and eroticism powerfully combine. With Elizabeth Jolley’s Stories, it’s probably best to begin with the last piece in the book, a self-styled self-portrait (‘A child went forth’) which in a few pages deftly, and with a puzzled naivety which I don’t think is false, sketches in her Austrian ...”

“... them for her dependants. Most lavish were the things she bought for her goddaughter and companion Elizabeth Acton, whose expenses appeared frequently in Jeffreys’s accounts until Acton married a local gentleman, and received her parting gifts, a fat sheep for her wedding feast and a generous dowry. Jeffreys also paid for her needy cousin Jane Gorton’s ...”

“... discretion. While preparing some years later for service in the Low Countries, he wrote to Elizabeth ‘most humbly to present such a cypher as little leysure coold afoord me. if there come any matter to my knowledg the importance wherof shall deseru to be so masked I will not fail … to your own handes to recommend it.’ Masking, not just through ...”