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“... 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 ...”

“... the Strand had become a magnet to the discontented, he believed that the rivals who now commanded Elizabeth’s favour were bent not only on manipulating the Queen to their advantage and the nation’s disadvantage, but on his own destruction. Only a pre-emptive strike, he concluded, could save him. On Sunday, 8 February, he set out to raise the city of ...”

“... Jones go unmentioned, and James’s only reference to vernacular verse is apparently his letter to Elizabeth, where he sends her, with all the hurt feelings of a snubbed author, a second copy of a sonnet, with the remarks: ‘Madame, I did send you before some verse ... and the bearer thereof returned and yet void of answer.’ It is not, to be sure, a very ...”

“... 1960s O’Brian told Tolstoy that ‘he had been quite a “bull” in his youth.’ He married Elizabeth Jones, a seamstress from North Wales, in February 1936. Richard, their son, was born a year later, followed two years after that by a daughter, Jane.Their marriage wasn’t a success. Patrick turned out to have a deep loathing of children which Tolstoy ...”

“... he knows it. Born in London in 1572, a year after a doomed international conspiracy to replace Elizabeth I with her papist cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, Donne was, as Katherine Rundell puts it in her new biography, ‘not just Catholic … but super-Catholic’, the scion of a double line of renowned religious recusants. His father’s family estates were ...”

“... in Egypt just when King Tut’s tomb is opened, gets photographed by Man Ray, has sherry with Elizabeth Bowen, runs into Arthur Waley at Iseult Gonne’s, becomes Freud’s analysand in 1933, reads her poetry before the future Queen Elizabeth II during the Second World War. One wonders why there has been no biopic, or ...”

“... and Scott Fitzgerald. This may be all to the good, though it leads him to such remarks as that Elizabeth Bennet’s ‘gay resilience in a society tending always towards dull conformity would make her a worthy heroine in a Stendhal novel, which cannot be said for many English heroines’. Perhaps it cannot at the moment, but no doubt it will be soon: to ...”