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“... 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 ...”

“... whether in his duelling, in the hectoring tone of a few of his letters both to his wife and to Elizabeth Barry, or in the domineering machismo of poems like “The Advice” or “Phyllis, be gentler, I advise”, and his sexual satires’. ‘Machismo’ is the appropriately damning word. Treglown warns against ‘a modern tendency to generalise ...”

“... other way of going on. They are on the fringe of the professional class; the two women Lesje and Elizabeth work in a museum and the man Nate (if man he is to be called) was once a lawyer and gave it up to be a toymaker. Elizabeth has sunk into apathy since the death of her most recent lover. Nate her husband compensates by ...”

“... novel in the US years before the Penguin school of cookery writers found its greatest star in Elizabeth David in the late Fifties and early Sixties. For these writers, and for Patience Gray, cookery is what the open road was to Cobbett or the natural history of Selbourne to Gilbert White. There is, however, a difference: these are women to whom food is ...”

“... In all our sets of mental pigeonholes there is one labelled ‘don’t bother’. It contains groups of people and of ideas to which we have decided not to pay attention. These books, in one way or another, relate to such groups. Women are an obvious case. Yet, except in societies which kill off female babies or starve small girls, they cannot be dismissed as a minority ...”

“... winds and towering seas that scattered the fleet, driving them far to the south. The Hind and the Elizabeth reached the western end of the Strait again nearly a month later, but the next day the Elizabeth was driven back into it. She eventually sailed for home and the Hind carried on alone, on an uninterrupted and ...”

“... Blackwood comes across a newspaper photograph of the jumped-up lawyer standing next to Queen Elizabeth at a public function. She can hardly contain her outrage and repulsion. ‘Maître Blum must have tenaciously elbowed through hundreds of guests at the soirée in order to get as close to the Queen of England as she had managed. She had got herself so ...”

“... on her first voyage. In 1940, stealthily, in time for trooping duties, there arrived the Queen Elizabeth (the name which, many thought, should have gone to the Queen Mary). If Winston Churchill was right, the two Queens, by virtue of their speed and ability to carry 15,000 men each, shortened the war by about a year. That much admired high prow of the ...”

“... Thames; his likeness to God on earth; the fusing of the white rose and the red in his marriage to Elizabeth of York; its progeny; and its progeny’s progeny which must soon follow, securing the dynasty in perpetuity. But as London thrilled to the rich displays of chivalry, roses, pomegranates, castles, senators and dragons, the king was watching the nobles ...”