“... what James conveys himself. As you might expect, Browning loves ‘and’. Here he is writing to Elizabeth Barrett about the splendours of the Dulwich Picture Gallery: ‘those two Guidos, the wonderful Rembrandt of Jacob’s vision, such a Watteau, the triumphant three Murillo pictures, a Giorgione music-lesson group, all the Poussins with the ...”

“... always a bit of a snob, and once chucked out of Andover, was impressed that Dunne had been to Williams College. He invited the nobody kid to a party at his home in the Holmby Hills. Dunne knew he was out of his element there, but he took it all in: Judy Garland and Sinatra singing ‘impromptu’ with a hired piano player. All the stars. ‘Before the ...”

“... and before I even read the piece I felt victorious, because the issue opened with an essay by Elizabeth Hardwick. The glamour of the moment was helped when Barbara Epstein came to my party at the Old Town Bar. She walked in clutching a copy of the paper and proceeded to smoke all my cigarettes, speaking about Lizzie and Wystan and how a good piece was ...”

“... poet with atrophied tastes, he can expect a commission to do something tasteful on Glynn Williams. The Commander has become the ashy residue of Neo-Romanticism, out there in the Fens, a John Piper with backbone, silhouetted against lowering skies, fretting to escape the inconvenience of some vulgar stiff and get at those rough flint churches. Philip ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the publication of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice in 1793 and The Adventures of Caleb Williams the following year, and ends shortly after the death in September 1797 of Mary Wollstonecraft, six months after their marriage, during the darkest period of his mourning. The volume includes letters to Joseph Priestley, Thomas Lawrence, John ...”

“... and his friends. He also wrote a powerful novel of social protest, Things As They Are, or Caleb Williams, in which the central characters, Falkland and Caleb, master and man, act out the mutually destructive relationship forced on them in their hierarchical society. Godwin’s academic personality and style are misleading, for the revolutionary years at any ...”

“... bouts of violence and religious mania. At times ‘the combined efforts of de Sade and Tennessee Williams couldn’t have done justice’ to the scene. Tony attacked Barbara (and her mother) several times before he killed her. Unfortunately fearlessness was her outstanding virtue. The last act of the tragedy in New York would not have happened if Tony had ...”

“... exclusion has made the genre ripe for feminist and lesbian reworking. Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid, Elizabeth George, Mary Wings and Katherine Forrest have re-created the detective as a single or Sapphic thirty-something woman, brandishing a handgun. The shape-shifting and self-suppression which most women, and especially lesbian women, perform daily have ...”

“... certain sharers of her aims: among literary critics, Wayne Booth; among philosophers, Bernard Williams and Stanley Cavell; among social scientists, Amartya Sen. Nussbaum explains her discovery of virtues eloquently, volubly, in the manner of a belated Victorian moralist. The reverse of a dry writer, she is fairly often deeply moved, and you come to know ...”

“... 1972 film The Death of Maria Malibran (Warhol encouraged her to take the part). Then came the full Elizabeth Taylor treatment, furs, premieres, restaurants (Darling was a traditionalist: ‘Restaurants should have carpets on the floor, upholstered seats and be dark’). She wasn’t interested in miniskirts: her idea of womanhood was embodied by Veronica ...”

“... Tomlinson’s pronouns are also more unstable than I had granted. He acknowledges in ‘Over Elizabeth Bridge ...’                                 that uncertainty And restless counterpointing of a verse ‘So wary of its I’, Iván, is me. In his 1978 collection, ‘The Scream’ has the poet dragged out of sleep by ...”

“... girls, but doesn’t follow this up by examining the remarkable letters written by Mrs Thrale, the Elizabeth Montagu set, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the Duchess of Devonshire or Lady Elizabeth Foster; the Duchess’s novel Sylph is not treated, either. In the second half of the book, ‘Literary Achievements’, we are on ...”

“... Fenland fogs. Really? The clue is surely in the name.Oliver’s​ great-great-grandfather, Morgan Williams from Glamorgan, who became an innkeeper in Putney, lucked out when he married Katherine Cromwell, the elder sister of the Thomas Cromwell who went on to become Henry VIII’s great minister. Morgan’s son Richard entered his uncle’s service and ...”

“... bystander and suggested he run along the deck to see if any stray pieces of ice had come on board. Elizabeth Eustis and Martha Eustis Stevenson, sisters from Haverford, Pennsylvania, travelling first-class, were asleep in their cabin. The collision, though almost soundless – ‘like tearing a strip of calico, nothing more’ – woke them up. ...”