“... general appear very unfavourably impressed by this poem, very unjustly, Robert and I think’: so Elizabeth Barrett Browning shortly after its publication. Larkin’s judgment in 1969 was very unjust to the body of the work. What predominates in a writer’s image is not necessarily the same as what makes that writer worth reading. Moncure Conway, along with ...”

“... is so natural and interesting that one might even wonder why it hasn’t been treated before. Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot (née Bosanquet), Mary Midgley (née Scrutton) and Iris Murdoch all matriculated at Oxford in the late 1930s. When most of the men went off to war, they found themselves, as women philosophy students, in a very unusual situation ...”

“... system of racial superiority to back up their prejudices. Historians of English racism often cite Elizabeth I’s proclamations in 1596 and 1601 against the presence of so many ‘blackamoors’, and note that the Crown hired a Lübeck merchant to remove black people on both occasions. But Elizabeth’s complaint focused on ...”

“... and services on one side and family apartments on the other.The Renaissance finally arrived during Elizabeth’s reign. She was less greedy for buildings than her father and was a patron by proxy, shrewdly encouraging ambitious courtiers to build glamorous houses for her entertainment, rather than paying for them herself. When she gave Kenilworth Castle to her ...”

“... According to the magus John Dee, whose antiquarian researches captured the attention of the queen, Elizabeth had ‘title royal to all the coasts and islands beginning at or about Terra Florida, and so alongst, or near unto Atlantis [America], going northerly, and then to all the most northern islands great and small, and so compassing about ...”

“... unveiled in the posthumous edition of Vive Moi! – long-running affairs with the writers Elizabeth Bowen and Honor Tracy and the American socialite Alene Erlanger – add to the dishonesty of his public image. Yet O’Faolain’s claim to heroism lies not in any righteous constancy but precisely in his inconsistency. Faced with the insistence of the ...”

“... the standard life (1913) by W. and R.A. Austen-Leigh.* The chief additions, for many years, were Elizabeth Jenkins’s Jane Austen (1938); the concise but illuminating early chapters of Mary Lascelles’s Jane Austen and Her Art (1939); and R.W. Chapman’s close work on the documents, first published in notes to his unrivalled edition of the novels and his ...”

“... of disappointment and morbidity is largely filled in by a long, long chapter on L.E.L. – Letitia Elizabeth Landon. The length of this chapter urges it to become a mini-biography in itself, and its abnormal extension in relation to other chapters distorts the shape of the book. Landon evidently fascinates Greer, however loathsome she claims to find the verses ...”

“... view which is much more congenial to him. James I in particular is not a favourite of his. Unlike Elizabeth, James relished Lord Henry Howard’s ‘unctuous brand of flattery’. He also had a penchant for beautiful young men. Ashton makes no moral judgment about their gender, but he is very critical of the fact that, unlike ...”

“... he sets out to educate with his favourite records and books, beginning with The Secret Garden. Elizabeth Jane Howard does a good job where she can feel as confident in her values as Cecil Roberts. She enters with zest into the details of hairdressing or Gavin’s mother’s cooking. She is no less confident with good, worthy sentiments that wouldn’t ...”

“... to an heiress for four years in order to travel the world, which he could not ask a wife to do. Elizabeth Longford, in her introduction, describes this as a characteristic blend of ‘cold calculation and sensitive consideration’. The book consists of extracts from Curzon’s Tales of Travel, Russia in Central Asia and Leaves from a Viceroy’s Notebook ...”

“... see Mrs Elton leafing through A la Carte as a substitute for actual cooking, and Emma consulting Elizabeth David for instruction in the matter of marrow-bones. Wherever the daily human comedy of manners is deployed as a cloak for our brute, indispensable appetites and satisfactions, food and drink must be present or, if absent, must expect to have their ...”

“... is recorded that Mrs Newton Crosland (1812-95) was reading fluently at the age of three. Both Mary Elizabeth (1806-1907) and Sara Coleridge (1802-52) are on record as being precocious: but Sara apparently had mastered several languages, including Latin and Greek, by the age of 11. Writing novels was part of this pattern of precocious attainment. ...”

“... the family, her mother Dora had run a dancing school to make a living, and so had her older sister Elizabeth; Isadora learned dancing, teaching and performing simultaneously, during her earliest years. In the 1890s, all four sisters and brothers appeared in dance concerts up and down the California coast, creating their own material; and this helped to form ...”

“... That the English have been slow to recognise James Merrill as the best poet in the language after Elizabeth Bishop has long seemed strange to Americans. Come to think of it, British recognition of Bishop herself was belated; for decades she was upstaged by Robert Lowell, probably because he lived in England and behaved in a way that seemed more certifiably poetic ...”