“... and Valentine Ackland, who were among his earliest enthusiasts, and subsequent correspondence from Elizabeth Wade White, another collector and supporter, and Peter Pears. Valentine introduced Craske’s pictures to her friend and occasional lover Dorothy Warren, who owned a gallery in Maddox Street (the one from which police confiscated D.H. Lawrence’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ladies. But only financial need could drive a lady to accept the humiliating drudgery involved. Elizabeth Eastlake turned her review of Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair in the Quarterly Review into a brusque analysis of the dilemma: ‘The real definition of a governess, in the English sense, is a being who is our equal in birth, manners and education but our ...”

“... in 1919. The story anticipates many of the elements of In Zodiac Light. A young Englishwoman, Elizabeth Mortlake, seeks solace from the loss of her brother, a pilot. Her chosen resort is next door to a British military hospital-cum-asylum, specialising in facial reconstruction. Its patients have suffered a variety of physical and psychological ...”

“... or extra-rationalism, in Coetzee’s work: as when, for instance, the eponymous protagonist of Elizabeth Costello (2003) enjoins us to use our imaginative sympathy to think (or be) like a bat; or when her sister the nun repudiates ‘the monster of reason, mechanical reason’. In his recent exchange of letters with Paul Auster, Coetzee blamed ‘the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Elizabeth Prettejohn’s​ book opens with a discussion of The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown, made in 1852-55 and now in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The painting shows a couple leaving England for Australia on a crowded boat. It is insistent in its sharp focus, and brilliant, even strident, in its modern palette: the purple and green of cabbages hanging from the ship’s railing, the bright rose of a windswept silk bonnet ribbon cutting across the centre of the picture, and the mauve fingers of an otherwise concealed infant ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... plus Andrew Solt wrote Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 remake, with June Allyson as Jo, Janet Leigh as Meg, Elizabeth Taylor as Amy and Margaret O’Brien as Beth. Peter Lawford played a glamorous Laurie – indeed, the screenplay describes Laurie as looking ‘not unlike our idea of Edgar Allan Poe’. Armstrong’s Little Women is the most British and Pickwickian of ...”

“... the pesky new medium to ‘crawl back into its tube’. It all went wrong. The 1957 film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, was epic only in the scale of its box-office failure. The chronically self-destructive Clift lost his good looks in an automobile crash during production, and has two disconcertingly different faces at various points in the ...”

“... by one of her two daughters. She is best known for her convent school novel Frost in May, which Elizabeth Bowen admired for being both a ‘minor classic’ and a ‘work of art’. It was published in 1933; by 1954 its author was complaining that it hung ‘round my neck like a withered wreath’. She would have liked her three subsequent novels and book ...”

“... of my closest friends. I have written about this in World within World, where Muriel is called ‘Elizabeth’. Many people think that Muriel Gardiner is the model for Julia in the story bearing that name by Lillian Hellman, published in Hellman’s second volume of ‘memoirs’, Pentimento. ‘Julia’ was made into a highly successful movie, starring Jane ...”