“... Nobody knows​ … nobody knows.’ Elizabeth Bishop said her grandmother’s remark was the chorus of her childhood. ‘I often wondered what my grandmother knew that none of the rest of us knew and if she alone knew it, or if it was a total mystery that really nobody knew except perhaps God.’ She ventured to ask: ‘What do you know, Gammie, that we don’t know? Why don’t you tell us? Tell me!’ Gammie wouldn’t say whether she was keeping a secret or confessing bewilderment; she just laughed and replied: ‘Go on with you! Scat!’ This image of a person obscurely in the know, at once self-collected and reticent, is also an image of the person Bishop became – or the one many took her to be ...”

“... Though England still had an heir to the throne in the ten-year-old Prince Henry, the queen, Elizabeth of York, now dangerously old at 36, immediately sought to make assurance doubly sure by conceiving again: the pregnancy was to kill her. Isabel and Ferdinand, however, wanted to maintain the alliance that the marriage of Catherine and Arthur had ...”

“... adorned the English throne.’ In the same year, A.L. Rowse dated the preface to The England of Elizabeth (and for Bindoff, Elizabeth was the ‘superb and matchless flower’) ‘Empire Day 1950’. It was left to W.G. Hoskins to commit the equivalent of the Great Parliament Fart of 1605 when he called his economic ...”

“... inconceivable that someone would have chosen to live with such a monster of egotism, and yet Elizabeth Christy left her husband in Greece and moved to London to be with Fowles. Warburton claims that ‘Elizabeth is at the centre of the books, as she was of John Fowles’s life. There were no publishable novels before ...”

“... a hundred pages before reaching the marriage, the coronation (splendidly described), the birth of Elizabeth. Along this road, Cardinal Wolsey falls by the wayside, the victim of his own honest miscalculation (he, too, could hardly believe what was happening) and Anne’s ruthlessness. An obscure bureaucrat called Thomas Cromwell appears on the ...”

“... and helpless to fix the damage. He was married three times: to Jean Stafford from 1940 to 1948, to Elizabeth Hardwick from 1949 to 1972 and to Caroline Blackwood from 1972 to his death in 1977. With Hardwick he had a daughter, Harriet, and with Blackwood a son, Sheridan; he was also stepfather to Blackwood’s three daughters. Towards the end of his marriage ...”

“... is just as interested in the displeasure that Bodichon provoked in other women – Dufferin, Elizabeth Gaskell, her censorious Aunt Patty and others. Bodichon’s crime was her indifference to the conventions that so many other women relied on to secure their respectability.The subtitle does the book no favours. Robinson understands well enough that ...”

“... Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s​ Sonnets, a pamphlet of just 48 pages, was once the holy grail of book collectors. Copies that came to light were, to quote one biographer, ‘literally worth … more than their weight in gold’: at auction on Madison Avenue in 1930 one fetched $1250 (around $23,000 in today’s money ...”

“... parish of Mountnessing in Essex in 1575, Archer grew up in a time of intense religious unease, as Elizabeth I and her ministers strove to define Protestant orthodoxy and impose it on the English people. Far from unifying the nation, the 1558 Act of Uniformity hardened divisions between Catholic diehards and Calvinist reformers, who themselves split into ...”

“... poets of the Fifties, which marks him as originally associated with, among others, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings and Philip Larkin. No less than they, he has gone his own way and no purpose is served by hanging this historical label round his neck now. Even in its time it contributed more to publicity than to enlightenment. Robert Conquest, as editor of ...”

“... they cross the Brazilian border to buy industrial alcohol to drink. And in For Prayer and Profit, Elizabeth Colson and Thayer Scudder paint a comprehensive – and grim – picture of the alcohol-assisted decline of the rural Tonga communities in Zambia’s Gwembe District. In Zambia drink and economic decay have complemented each other over the years and ...”

“... Not since Arnold Bennett, Elizabeth Bowen and Vicki Baum can a novelist have looked so readily for resonance in the name and function of hotels. After his world-beating Freudian serve with The White Hotel here is D.M. Thomas again, standing on the baseline at the start of his new novel in yet another hotel setting ...”

“... his wife’s salon as well. Unlike the reclusive Tulkinghorn in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, George and Elizabeth Lewis in Portland Place entertained a sparkling array of the period’s artists (Alma-Tadema, Whistler and Burne-Jones, with whom they were on especially intimate terms), writers (Barrie, Meredith, Hardy, Henry James), and theatrical people (Irving and ...”

“... the period after the Second World War.’ She gives much of the credit for this shift in taste to Elizabeth David, who in the 1950s preached that the fruits of the earth were more than mere adjuncts to flesh. Now the high price of meat is doing Mrs David’s work for her. The campaign has been waged mostly by women, over the dead bodies (metaphorically and ...”

“... the point, for the novel’s life is over – would we go on being interested in a married Emma or Elizabeth Bennet? – but Anita Brookner performs the feat in a characteristically unnerving if elegant way. Her heroine Anna is still there on the page, in the last few pages, when she loses her point and joins all the rest of us in our all too real ...”