“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... agent for the King’s Secret, to act as a courier for a secret correspondence between the Empress Elizabeth of Russia and Louis XV. He proved a great success as a spy, and equally as a diplomat, winning golden opinions all round – so much so that the Empress wanted him to take a post at her court. By this time, however, he was pining to see action as a ...”

“... like Clare, obstinate linguistic feminists like Emily Dickinson, First World writers like Elizabeth Bishop with Third World imaginations, Eastern European activists and ‘wakers-up’ like Holub and Herbert, deconstructive poets of soccer-violence Britain like Peter Reading. Opposed to them are a number of predictable villains ...”

“... And why not? Shouldn’t the person being toasted be allowed to express her ghostly self? At Elizabeth Jane Howard’s, the voice of the dearly departed couldn’t have been more distinctive. (By the way, is the departed a victim, as in a victim of death, or merely a passive recipient? Not to sound like an ad for Center Parcs, but does one suffer ...”

“... alchemist, book collector and egotist. Again like Tycho, he advised his sovereign, in his case Elizabeth I, on astrological matters, and also on such down-to-earth questions as whether to invest in voyages of exploration and how to provide timber for the British Navy; and he outlined a course of astronomical and astrological observations and calculations ...”

“... never became a Catholic monk. Michel de Castelnau, the French ambassador, did not ‘trust’ that Elizabeth could be assassinated, and his secretary, Courcelles, did not become an English mole. (I confess that I said he did, but withdrew the charge in a second account which Honan cites.) Padua was not an independent city-state. The English College at Douai ...”

“... extensive notes on his visits to Picasso over the years, his letters to the artist, and Elizabeth Cowling’s invaluable explanations and interpretations of these writings. Without her comments, we would quite often lose the point and, just as often, the meaning of these scribblings and musings, which take us from the first moments of the ...”

“... saved England from becoming yet another component of the Habsburg Empire. Her half-sister, Elizabeth I, avoided the problem by avoiding matrimony altogether. Anne’s consort, the dim Prince George of Denmark, confined himself largely to trying (and failing) to provide a successor to the Stuart crown. It is the most cogent testimony to Prince ...”