“... the Booker should favour. Ah, that would explain the exclusion of Coetzee’s novel of ideas, Elizabeth Costello – not up to the Hornby level. To be fair to him, the former Merton Professor is not slumming; he’s bought the place and moved right in. But prize-winners should not be blamed for prizes, any more than gnats for standing water, and ...”

“... According to the magus John Dee, whose antiquarian researches captured the attention of the queen, Elizabeth had ‘title royal to all the coasts and islands beginning at or about Terra Florida, and so alongst, or near unto Atlantis [America], going northerly, and then to all the most northern islands great and small, and so compassing about ...”

“... the sacred encounters of his imagination that a poet’s impulse to write a poem arises.’ The Elizabeth Bishop who likened knowledge to water, ‘dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free’, would probably have agreed. So the introduction is an obvious disaster; the 55 poets, you feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets ...”

“... on top of the daughter he had fathered before he married, he had himself had two children by Lady Elizabeth Foster (Bess); according to the double standards of the day that, however, was fully acceptable, and the Duke’s bastards by Bess were brought up alongside his legitimate children. Rather more unusually, Bess, too, lived in Devonshire House with the ...”

“... purpose is fulfilled it will surely give rise to yet another. In God stand up for bastards (1973) David Leitch addressed the natural mother who had given him away at birth, entreating her to come forward. And she did. They met and became friends. She died, whereupon a sister he had never known rang him up. They met and became friends. A second sister was ...”

“... his own emotions ebbed and flowed. In April 1915 he was ‘mad with misery and hostility’ over David Garnett’s entanglement with Bloomsbury homosexuality. A year later came Lawrence’s abortive effort at blutbrüderschaft with John Middleton Murry. In the summer of 1918 Lawrence probably consummated his infatuation with the Cornish farmer, William ...”

“... a value on titles,’ he purred, ‘and I go with the great stream of life.’ Another member was David Garrick, who grew up alongside Johnson in provincial Lichfield, and shot to prominence in his twenties for the revolutionary naturalism of his acting style, notably his startling performance as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the ...”

“... he took up with her too, although she came to infuriate him. Then there was a year or so with Elizabeth von Arnim, and a woman who tried to kill herself in front of him, and a few (not many) prostitutes. And there was also of course Rebecca West, whom he called his ‘panther’, and by whom he had a son (whose middle name was Panther) in 1914. West was ...”

“... his account of English constitutional history. But in telling the story of the English monarchy, David Starkey found no occasion even to mention Cromwell’s name.* Now, with the publication of Robert Hutchinson’s biography of Cromwell, it is as if Beria has come back to haunt us, requiring a further revision of the Encyclopedia. And the analogy is not so ...”

“... of Portsmouth where his father, John Dickens, worked in the Naval Pay Office. His mother, Elizabeth, is reported to have claimed that she went to a ball on the night before his birth; but no ball is mentioned in the area for that particular evening and it is likely that this is one of the many apocryphal stories which sprung up around the birth and ...”

“... Avenue, which he nicknamed the Caviar Club, enjoying the food and the opportunities for gossip. Elizabeth Taylor was at that time involved in ‘a highly complicated romantic relationship’ with Ardeshir Zahedi, the Iranian ambassador to Washington, and Warhol was able to tell friends that Zahedi ‘was getting nervous about her getting ...”

“... perfectly controls his own fate.’ Like J.A. Froude, balancing the books on Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, Elton believed that all Henry’s achievements were those of others, and above all the towering achievement of his minister Thomas Cromwell, whose idea it was to declare UDI on the pope, and, in effect, the rest of Europe. Not all of those who came ...”

“... letters of dependent family members was common, if resented. In the 1740s, the young bluestocking Elizabeth Robinson (later Montagu) was appalled to find that her mother had read and disapproved of a flippant letter she had written to her sister. Nor cou’d I imagine that I was writing what anyone wou’d read except [Sarah] herself; if I had thought so, I ...”

“... desire to be liked, is a gift to an author and the reader throughout is on her side. Had it been Elizabeth I it might have been a celebratory masque, as Her Majesty comes well out of every encounter, besting her ministers, her courtiers and even her devoted subjects.I never met the queen except once as part of an assembly line and I’m glad as I would have ...”

“... form, when it came to beggaring explanation, well before she embarked on Wuthering Heights. While Elizabeth Gaskell was researching her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), someone lent her a ‘most extraordinary’ packet containing an ‘immense amount of manuscript’ written in a hand impossible to decipher without the aid of a magnifying glass. These ...”