“... remark. It takes us straight out of Tennyson country into the land of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Or Elizabeth Bowen, or Elizabeth Taylor. Mutual marital embarrassment – how un-Victorian and un-Tennysonian – is one of the little things those novelists are so good at conveying. The most absorbing aspect of Ann Thwaite’s ...”

“... a Hero, has not worn well. The parents of George, the ‘hero’, are parodic monsters. The wife, Elizabeth, and the mistress, Fanny, are the sort of predatory women who can and do drive a man to his death. George nourishes ambitions to break into the world of letters, for reasons that are mysterious, since he despises that world: ‘In the course of his ...”

“... common – Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, P.L. Travers, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bishop, Nadine Gordimer and Anne Sexton, who appear in the volume alongside the writers already mentioned – is that they are not men, which is not as tautological a proposition as it looks. Being a woman writer is only partly a matter of how any ...”

“... every literate citizen of Red Cloud or scholar at the university – most notably Bernice Slote, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Mildred Bennett and Elizabeth Moorhead. Her earlier biographers had all been men who shielded her gallantly from any disrepute and in some cases – E.K. Brown, James Woodress – raised her to the ...”

“... gratitude. There are moments of kindness and forbearance in his correspondence with the novelist Elizabeth Harrower, the painter Brett Whitely and Cynthia Nolan, as well as supportive letters to Randolph Stow, his modest and neglected peer. There are moments, too, in his long relationship with Viking’s Ben Huebsch, but the brightest example, the most ...”

“... her daughter died and (incredibly) the year she began Miss Marjoribanks, Oliphant had taken up Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, and found that shecould not help comparing myself with the picture more or less as I read. I don’t suppose my powers are equal to hers … but yet I have had far more experience, and, I think, a fuller ...”

“... mortifying, and cause deep pain to his long-suffering wife Simone – and later to his girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley – along with his three children. What can he do except hold his hands up and ask for forgiveness? But he refuses to learn his lesson. One evening in 2006, in the middle of a match he was playing for Hampshire, he got a text from a woman he’d ...”

“... by their own laws. Traders had operated from Genoa, Venice and even England before this, but after Elizabeth I was declared a heretic in 1570, the English saw their contacts with the Ottomans not only as a way of circumventing European control of the passage of luxury items from the east but as a means of challenging the Catholic countries’ presence in the ...”

“... behind. But the novels also belong to an important tradition of English writers, mostly women – Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor and Rumer Godden and Penelope Fitzgerald among them – whose subject is the old world of class and empire, and the systems of education and intricate cultural codes that supported ...”

“... service to the horrors of slavery itself. In the 1970s Genovese started to write with his wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. A prolific scholar in her own right, she is best known for Within the Plantation Household, a study of women in the antebellum South, published in 1988. Though she died in 2007, she and her husband are listed as co-authors of Slavery in ...”

“... to supply anatomy teachers with corpses for dissection. In Dying for Victorian Medicine, Elizabeth Hurren uncovers a sordid trade that commoditised human remains. At the consumer end of the market were the medical schools, avid for dissection material following increases in 1858 and 1885 to the part played by anatomy in the medical syllabus. At the ...”

“... storytellers like Robert Stone and Joyce Carol Oates. He got mugged by realism. He realised that Elizabeth Bowen is just as good as Virginia Woolf but without the ‘affected prose style’, and that the selling of high art is ‘just one more form of commercialism’. The break came when he was assigned to review a collection by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The ...”

“... she knew how to please the paymaster. Poems such as ‘The Bas Bleu’ eulogised the bluestockings Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Carter who had made her welcome (the wealthy Montagu was one of her patrons); and when she started lecturing ‘the great’ on their propensity for drinking, gambling and having their hair done ...”

“... they let London invade them. Excursionists arriving at the chalk quarry, to the east of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge at Dartford, just off Watling Street, find themselves in a sort of processing plant or customs post for asylum seekers. A channel port (on go-slow). Bluewater skulks in the desert like the Tunisian set for a Star Wars sequel. Humans, having ...”

“... bishops eventually dispersed or rendered powerless. But Edward died young and when his half-sister Elizabeth brought back Protestantism in 1558-59, she was not inclined to go even as far as Edward in forcing change. So the Church of England, more by luck than judgment, preserved far more of the old life of secular and monastic cathedrals than any other ...”