“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was it because, by getting inside the White House, he had exposed them for failing to do the same? Elizabeth Drew in the New Republic dismissed Fire and Fury: ‘better books’, she said, would be published soon. Better books? She mentioned David Frum’s Trumpocracy as an example, with its less than thrilling subtitle ‘The Corruption of the American ...”

“... closer to being a poem than a novel: if not verse, then at least prose with blood pressure – Elizabeth Cook neatly situates this passage a third of the way through the book, in a space between chapters. On the previous page, Achilles has committed himself to Troy. What follows draws out the dramatic potential of the dilemma, despite its predetermined ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... American opulence and British immiseration was responsible for considerable anguish. (Princess Elizabeth, in common with other brides, was given 200 extra clothing coupons to use for her wedding dress.) Apart from dried fruit, my other main memory of this period is of the ‘dollar gap’ – a phrase then on everyone’s lips. Today the world is awash ...”

“... to qualify, ‘Bloody Mary’ (‘A Catholic Queen in a Protestant Country’, I mean . . .), Elizabeth Countess Barthory (‘Countess Dracula’) and Ilse Koch (‘The Bitch of Buchenwald’), their presence owes more to the Equal Opportunities Commission than to anything they actually did. What with one thing or another, the word ‘evil’ has never ...”

“... with John Sutherland’s Was Heathcliff a Murderer?, Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? and Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? but you might be interested to know they’ve been collected in an omnibus edition with a new introduction, under the title The Literary Detective (Oxford, £12.99), in plenty of time for Christmas. And if you go to see Dead Babies, bear in mind ...”

“... girls, but doesn’t follow this up by examining the remarkable letters written by Mrs Thrale, the Elizabeth Montagu set, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the Duchess of Devonshire or Lady Elizabeth Foster; the Duchess’s novel Sylph is not treated, either. In the second half of the book, ‘Literary Achievements’, we are on ...”

“... it as ‘suffrage work – or women’s work – in another form’ in a letter to her mother, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the medical pioneer of the mid-Victorian women’s movement.With Murray, a Scottish-born anaesthetist, Anderson established the Women’s Hospital Corps, a mobile medical unit that could be deployed swiftly to northern France, but ...”