“... 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 ...”

“... new lessons from ancient hunters and herdsmen. Following domestication, write James Serpell and Elizabeth Paul, religious and secular ideologies reinforced ‘hierarchical notions of human separateness and superiority’, and the idea of animals as somehow equal with humans gave way to the world described in the Book of Genesis. Evolutionists and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an uncommon name, and the playwright’s direct line died out in 1670 with his granddaughter Lady Elizabeth Barnard). The picture came into the family soon after the First World War, kindly provided by someone who couldn’t bear the idea that a modern-day William Shakespeare – whom she met, moreover, in her adopted home county of Warwickshire ...”

“... a luxury retirement village in the Kent countryside. Every Thursday they meet to solve cold cases. Elizabeth (who will be played by Helen Mirren in the forthcoming movie) is a retired MI6 agent, Joyce (Celia Imrie) a former nurse, Ron (Pierce Brosnan) a one-time union organiser and Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley) an ex-psychiatrist. Their former careers give them a ...”

“... significance, hosts and attendees had to work harder to make an impression. In May 1749, Lady Elizabeth Chudleigh, maid of honour to the Princess of Wales, appeared at the Ranelagh Gardens masquerade in the character of Iphigenia, wearing from the waist up only a see-through gauze covering. She had been the subject of scandal before, with reports of an ...”

“... representation that has more in common with the head of Alexander the Great on a coin, with Queen Elizabeth in any number of portraits, or Queen Victoria in the statues that stand on plinths in squares and parks all over her erstwhile empire than with a portrait like Sargent’s of Henry James, which encourages you to look for evidence of personality in ...”

“... title, like the Most Serene Republic of San Marino. Its head of state is your very own Queen Elizabeth II (though she exercises authority on Jersey as the Duke of Normandy). The local currency is the Jersey pound, convertible on a one-to-one basis with its mainland namesake. In fact, there’s nothing much that would make you sit up and take notice of ...”

“... troublingly close to that of James Stuart, the heir presumptive when the play was written. Once Elizabeth I finally died, Shakespeare would be a subject of the son of Mary Queen of Scots, who, like Gertrude, had married the apparent murderer (Bothwell) of her first husband (Darnley); and therefore Hamlet, while unable to stop obsessing about what that ...”

“... knew to their cost. The Society of 1707 was not the first. Another society was founded under Elizabeth I. But her successor, James I, ‘took a little Mislike’ to it and it fizzled out. Charles I made the antiquary Robert Cotton close his famous library, thinking it seditious. Suspected at various times of anti-Stuart sympathies, closet ...”

“... of all women whose creative work was allowed to lapse unexamined in a man’s world.But when Elizabeth Miller, born in 1907 and comfortably reared in Poughkeepsie, first arrived in New York and attracted public notice, she did it by typifying the post-Great War flapper, a new creature who threatened old norms of female being and behaviour. Fashion for ...”

“... contaminate. That’s the argument of ‘Lesson 6: The Problem of Evil’, part of Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, a book that is probably easiest to categorise as non-non-fiction. This is the other side of the postmodernist coin (the coin that calls all value into question). As well as writing novels that contain a character sharing some of the author’s ...”