“... subtitled ‘On Loves and the Lover-Shadow’ and recounting his love-affairs with Amber Reeves, Elizabeth von Arnim, Rebecca West, Odette Keun, Moura Budberg and others. It was definitely intended for publication (posthumously simply because of the libel dangers), and Wells wanted it to be bound up with Experiment in Autobiography and The Book of Catherine ...”

“... Reading along in Elizabeth Bruehl-Young’s biography of the philosopher Hannah Arendt I came across an item that astonished me. Every afternoon when at home in her West Side apartment in Manhattan, Hannah Arendt used to set herself out on the couch in her living-room and, for an hour or so, do nothing but think. Professor Bruehl-Young doesn’t say about what Hannah Arendt thought, but then perhaps there is no need for her to have done so ...”

“... as those who have discerned this rebellion contriving from (if not before) the death of Queen Elizabeth’. One wonders what he would have made of Stone’s lectures, in which we were taken back to the reign of Henry VIII, and learned as much about population movements and the educational system as about religion and politics. It was the total history of ...”

“... been given to the city at the dissolution of the monasteries. A year later, on 3 March 1592, Queen Elizabeth issued a charter incorporating ‘the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity near Dublin’ as ‘the mother of a university’ with the aim of providing ‘education, training and instruction of youths and students in the arts and faculties ... that ...”

“... is imprisoned during a revolt of his subjects, and his betrothed, the ‘fair and gentle’ Lady Elizabeth, elects to share his captivity. After an idyllic period, singing, as it were, like birds in the cage, they become weakened and disillusioned by hardship. Bargaining for release, Lady Elizabeth does her best to seduce ...”

“... in earlier scholarship on Haywood, the Rev. Valentine Haywood, a hapless clergyman whose wife Elizabeth absconded in 1721, prompting him to advertise for leads in a London newspaper. This Elizabeth, it seems, was someone else. More important than the biographical red herrings are the enduring assumptions that flow from ...”

“... In​ Olive, Again, her seventh book, Elizabeth Strout returns to her character Olive Kitteridge, a maths teacher in small-town Maine. A number of the chapters in Strout’s first, eponymous book about the character had already appeared in print as short stories before the novel’s publication in 2008, so that Olive Kitteridge is really half a novel, half a collection of stories; Olive, Again and most of Strout’s other books have the same hybrid form ...”

“... encounter in St Luke’s Gospel between the expectant Virgin Mary and her sixty-year-old cousin Elizabeth, improbably pregnant, in the days before IVF, with John the Baptist. The Visitation is the Second Joyful Mystery of the rosary. For those who grew up in Catholic Ireland, it was also a cautionary tale: if it happened to them, it could happen to ...”

“... but only barely. It is no surprise that one of Joan Didion’s most attentive readers has been Elizabeth Hardwick, whose own work, like Didion’s, is never merely essay or novel, even if, for the occasion, the work must pretend to be one or the other. Elizabeth Hardwick’s review of a theatre production is as much a ...”

“... ended fatally. Norton found ‘one of the most tragic cases’ concerned a maidservant called Elizabeth Abbott, who in 1624 turned to neighbours for help again and again against the beatings ‘with smale lyne or whip corde ... sometimes with fish hooks attached’ to which she was subjected by her master and mistress and ‘other servants acting at their ...”

“... King’s fate a more personal message. ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’ the ageing Queen Elizabeth demanded, mindful of her fallen favourite, the Earl of Essex, and his forlorn attempt to rally support for his claim to the throne by staging the tragedy of Richard’s fall ‘forty times in open streets and houses’. The play Essex performed was, in ...”

“... Lowell – during a bout of mania – announced to the world that he was about to leave his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in order to marry a young Italian he had fallen for. He quite often made announcements of this kind, when mad, but this time he decided to deliver the good news in person to Jarrell. Of the encounter that ensued, Jarrell’s widow has ...”

“... native Vermont. The Shipping News was infused with the foggy chill of Maritime Canada – what Elizabeth Bishop called ‘the narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea’, where Proulx’s ancestors had come from. It is, however, a constitutional prerogative of American writers to reinvent themselves, regardless of age. And the regionalist impulse in US ...”

“... of Welsh and English. The mistake which Pope Pius V made in excommunicating and deposing Queen Elizabeth was one reason Pius XII was reluctant to take a firmer line against Adolf Hitler. Sir Philip Sidney’s state funeral was delayed until February 1587, perhaps to provide a ceremonial counterpoint to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. In Elizabethan ...”

“... play The Blue Bird. The work starred Jane Fonda as Night, Ava Gardner as Luxury, and Elizabeth Taylor as Queen of Light and Maternal Love. You can see where the problems might arise, even if Maeterlinck was not a bit of a problem to start with. It was a Soviet-American coproduction, partly shot in what was then Leningrad, where Harrison ...”