“... 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 ...”

“... the exasperating reality of these characters. Too wise to chat like amateurs about why they like Elizabeth Bennet, they measure the effects of successful characterisation in negative qualities: the selfishness of Rosamund Vincy, the priggishness of Stephen Dedalus. Woloch looks at the question of how living persons get ‘rendered into literary form’ from ...”

“... woman William married – Lucy Madox Brown, the daughter of Ford Madox Brown and his first wife, Elizabeth Bromley. Lucy seems to have been pushed to the side when Elizabeth died. Relations with Brown’s second wife, Emma, and her children were always tense. As a young woman, Lucy worked as an apprentice in her father’s ...”

“... would sail to Margate, establish a beachhead, unload their mighty siege train and march on London. Elizabeth I, who had no standing army, was to be captured or killed.In overall charge, though remaining in Spain, was Parma’s uncle, Philip II. Short, dressed in black, with eyes ‘somewhat red’ and the jutting jaw of a Habsburg, Philip did not look like ...”

“... and her disapproval of the ‘downright cynicism’ in Brenda Maddox’s witty comparison of Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth II (‘they are growing older in the same way, taking on the sexless look of Oriental potentates, with their geological gems and turbans’) sent me fleeing to the news-stand in search of the ...”

“... of Parliament, as well as an armed raid in the Midlands to get hold of James’s young daughter Elizabeth (later the Winter Queen of Bohemia), and set her up as the figurehead of a new regime with, perhaps, the Earl of Northumberland as Protector. Having settled that, they swore an oath of secrecy, and received communion at a Mass said by the Jesuit John ...”

“... writing. Having read ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’, Browning declares in his first letter to Elizabeth Barrett: ‘I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart – and I love you too.’ Those rare, and usually misbegotten, occasions when the reader and writer approach each other directly are what interest Frances Wilson. Not the intriguing ...”

“... have difficulty in finding a firm standing ground from which to view their disintegrating scene. Elizabeth North’s Florence Avenue takes a group of survivors from the flower-children period. They now have teenage children themselves and have made various half-hearted adjustments to the bourgeois world. Monica, who tells the story in her own grisly ...”

“... a good deal to the boy’s popularity. He is already set apart.Gainsborough’s painting of Elizabeth and Mary Linley (also on display at the National Gallery) is more subtle. The sisters had brief singing careers in London and Bath. Elizabeth, in blue, eloped to France with the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan ...”

“... deserve something a bit more nourishing than the plot, which is 100 per cent cumin-coated tripe. Elizabeth Lowry’s The Bellini Madonna, mercifully, is set not in a Venice that’s trying to be a fake Canaletto but in a ‘17th-century manor house with Victorian accretions’, which a few pages later acquires ‘two sweeping Georgian side elevations’, and ...”