“... In June 1914, the 24-year-old Isaac Rosenberg left his home in Stepney, East London, to stay with his married sister Minnie Horvitch in Cape Town in the hope that the climate might improve his health. He was in Cape Town when he heard that war had been declared. He responded in ‘On Receiving News of the War: Cape Town’: Snow is a strange white word ...”

“... The majority of books about John F. Kennedy have been written either by toadying family retainers or by people bent on destroying the Camelot myth. The historian Robert Dallek is neither; he decided to enter the field, as he explains in his introduction, in part because documents had become available that threw new light on several aspects of Kennedy’s life, and in part because he thought the old ones should be given a fresh reading ...”

“... The two central facts about Malcolm Lowry are that he wrote and that he drank. He drank while writing – or possibly he wrote while drinking. When he died in June 1957 after downing a lethal mix of barbiturates and gin (the coroner’s verdict was ‘death by misadventure’), he left behind a trunk full of unfinished manuscripts and an impracticably ambitious scheme to develop all his work in progress and his two published novels into a complex sequence for which the projected title was The Voyage That Never Ends ...”

“... her experience that Karcher would have had her draw. Worse, she reproved feminist women, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Victoria Woodhull, who attacked marriage and promoted free love. In Child’s view, such women ‘recklessly ... throw overboard the question of duty toward households, or toward society! ... They are so wild for freedom, that they ...”

“... The dog/human bond,​ for all its importance, is one of the least examined relationships in Western culture. To some, a dog is merely an object, there to perform a function such as pulling a sled or guarding a property, to be discarded when no longer useful. To others, a dog is a stand-in, for a child to cherish or an enemy to abuse. To still others, a dog is like a body part – scarcely deemed to have a separate identity, and essential to normal existence ...”

“... of genius, or neargenius – time will decide – who was heart-cloven and split-minded it is Elizabeth Bowen. Romantic-realist, yearning-sceptic, emotional-intellectual, poetic-pragmatist, objective-subjective, gregarious-detached (though everybody who resides in a typewriter has to be a bit of that), tragi-humorous, consistently declaring herself born ...”

“... that it conveys some of the divisions operating within the landed class. Its prime gentry heroine, Elizabeth Parker of Alkincoats, later Elizabeth Shackleton, is shown moving among a wide array of lesser landed, trading and professional acquaintances. But, as Vickery points out, she was ‘not on visiting terms with noble ...”

“... The earliest poem collected in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, Alice Quinn’s edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s miscellaneous drafts and fragments, opens: I introduce Penelope Gwin, A friend of mine through thick and thin, Who’s travelled much in foreign parts Pursuing culture and the arts. ‘And also,’ says Penelope ‘This family life is not for me ...”

“... Choosing​ a husband for Elizabeth I was always going to be tricky, but in 1560 the diplomat Nicholas Throckmorton announced that he’d figured it out. Throckmorton’s choice would strengthen Elizabeth’s claim to the throne, unite the island of Britain and guarantee peace with France ...”

“... published in 2005 to mark four hundred years since the Gunpowder Plot, Antonia Fraser imagined Elizabeth Stuart being crowned as Queen Elizabeth II in January 1606. ‘The Gunpowder Plot Succeeds’ describes the plotters’ confessed intention, in the chaos following the death of James VI and I in the explosion at ...”

“... and doom caused by a sterile war, economic distress and mounting fears for the future, were over. Elizabeth, the ruler who had hung on to life for too long, was dead. The reaction which she had feared, she herself having experienced it in 1558 as heir to a dying monarch, happened. Relief, rather than mourning, greeted Gloriana’s passing; and all eyes turned ...”

“... requires of a monarch. It was not always so. Whatever else has been said about the first Elizabeth (one recalls Sheridan’s ‘no scandal about Queen Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull. In sending her royal brother Edward VI her youthful likeness, soon to be hidden for ever behind ...”

“... systems, sending a tremor through individual lives, wrecking certainties, reorganising identities. Elizabeth Marsh was one of those shaken by the times she lived through, her personal ‘ordeal’ intimately connected with global forces beyond the grasp of any individual then living. Conceived in Port Royal, born in Portsmouth, she ‘travelled further and ...”

“... that the sufferer might go on to negotiate adulthood with much success, let alone emerge as Elizabeth I – possibly the most politically adroit, intelligent and successful monarch ever to occupy the English throne. Yet, during a long reign of 44 years, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn contrived to steer a middle course in religion between the ...”