“... plot is taken from Knut Hamsun’s novel Pan, to which Fante was introduced by his sometime agent Elizabeth Nowell in 1936. The title comes from a passage in which Hamsun’s narrator compresses the story of his doomed love affairs into a fable about a ‘lord’ who loves two women – a compliant ‘maid’ and ‘another’: This other he loved as a ...”

“... How​ does a comic writer describe a world that has stopped being funny? What to say when the system you satirise is swept away, when parts of the population are killed, when the survivors become refugees, drifting away en masse but it’s unclear where to? Teffi was faced with these questions as she tried to make sense of revolution in St Petersburg, as she fled through the Civil War, as she crossed the Black Sea along with other refugees to start a new life in a place which would in turn be engulfed by fascism and war ...”

“... turned inward and began to disintegrate. When the report was published I was outside the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in the shadow of Westminster Abbey, with family members of British soldiers killed or injured during the conflict. During the day the atmosphere swung between anxiety and expectation, celebration and anger. Chilcot’s statement given that ...”

“... Protestants, many puritans had unrealistic expectations of her successor. They therefore detested Elizabeth I’s church settlement of 1559, with its concessions to Lutherans and Catholics, including the requirements that ministers wear priestly vestments and accept Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. Church government was another bugbear. Allegiance ...”

“... stories in particular remind me of those by an expert in the art from a previous generation, Elizabeth Bowen. ‘Wilderness Tips’, which is about a nice family at their lakeside holiday home, and the city interloper who has married among them, would have specially pleased the older artist. The daughters of the house all have matching names ...”

“... vigilance, with protecting his own turf. The writers he likes pose little or no threat – Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell: either safely senior or safely underrated by the mob. Philip Larkin used to exhibit the same tendency when asked to name his lineup: Barbara Pym, Stevie ...”

“... contemporaries, ‘living’ did not mean family life and duties. She avoided the trap that Elizabeth Barrett Browning described in Aurora Leigh – that of the English wife educated strictly to the level of agreement with her husband.Their rapid insight and fine aptitude,Particular worth and missionariness,As long as they keep quiet by the fireAnd ...”

“... Yeats’s ideas which the pseudo-Augustan iconoclasm of Yvor Winters was not sufficient to upset. Elizabeth Cullingford’s selection of essays on the poems of 1919-1935 is an admirable guide to the centre of the Yeatsian labyrinth, enhanced by an introductory essay which describes the evolution of the massive commentary with such concision that we are almost ...”

“... of references to a philosopher called ‘Gertrude Anscombe’ until I remembered that Professor Elizabeth Anscombe’s initials were G.E.M. The main theses which Beauchamp and Rosenberg ably defend are that historians of philosophy have been at fault in supposing that Hume’s conclusions about the nature of causality were primarily sceptical, that Hume was ...”

“... and De Valera. The subtitle ‘20th-century Lives’ does not disqualify a Great Victorian like Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who was born in 1836 and in 1873 became the first woman member of the British Medical Association (she died in 1917). Harold Oxbury is principal editor of the Concise Dictionary of National Biography 1901-1970 and it is from the parent ...”

“... the misnamed ‘Year of Africa’, ‘a new era of the African Church was about to begin’; and Elizabeth Isichei has clearly felt the same Christian impulse from a somewhat more African-centred approach. Both writers are using a scale of reference wider than that of a mere transition from colonial to para-colonial institutions of African ...”

“... memory of Ellroy’s mother and is based on another real-life crime, the murder and mutilation of Elizabeth Short in 1947. The dedication reads, ‘To Geneva Hilliker Ellroy 1915-1958. Mother: Twenty-nine years later, this valediction in blood’, and the novel starts: I never knew her in life. She exists for me through others, in evidence of the ways her ...”

“... The best place​ to begin Elizabeth Allen’s study of sanctuary seeking in medieval England is the coda: ‘Sanctuary in Southwest Georgia, 1962’. Here Allen vividly recounts an incident from the American civil rights movement in which her father, Ralph Allen, played an important role. He was one of two white college students who joined 38 Black activists in a voting rights campaign ...”

“... great theoreticians of war, though translations of Caesar and Machiavelli were printed in Elizabeth I’s reign. Arthur Golding, the translator of Gallic War (1565), made a robust statement of the English crown’s rightful claim to the kingdom of France, the central assumption underlying Henry’s campaigns; while Peter Whitehorne offered The Art of ...”

“... female agency was hedged by local constraints and conflicting imperatives. When a Londoner called Elizabeth Spinkes lay bleeding in the street having leapt out of the window to escape her husband, ‘some of the women of the neighbourhood came to her assistance,’ though they were forced to retreat when her physician husband threatened to have their husbands ...”