“... How long will it last, how much will it cost? No one certain. Tuesday 22: Another copy of Elizabeth Smart’s Journal from Collins. Note from Geoffrey Bush about performance of Zodiac song-cycle at Salisbury on 13 February. Wrote to Ann Minkowski sending dedicated inserts from her copy of L’Autre back to her, and expressing sympathy with ...”

“... garden, adorned with silver globes, goldfish in miniature grottoes and flowers in Grecian urns. As Elizabeth Jones writes in ‘Keats in the Suburbs’,* the genius of this style of gardening was the great horticulturalist John Claudius Loudoun (a road in St John’s Wood is named after him), who in 1838 published his Suburban Gardener and Villa ...”

“... apparent that such projects were attempted before Charles’s reign, by a client of Burghley under Elizabeth and by the Earl of Exeter under James. They were advocated by such ‘apolitical’ writers as Camden. During the 1630s the promoters of the works included the King and courtiers, but also a local entrepreneur, Sir John Monson, while the largest scheme ...”

“... a Letter has qualities which put Cheever’s playful fictions into perspective. It reminds me of Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station: this, too, is an intense elegy of loss and rejection. It has the same grief, the same courage, and the same need to counter self-pity by a hard retelling of bitter memories. In her middle age and after 12 ...”

“... is deliberately subdued in tone, Paddy Kitchen’s novel The Golden Veil is flat. The subject is Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (or Siddal, as Rossetti preferred to spell it), the milliner’s apprentice who became Beatrice to Dante Gabriel. Beatrice, or the Sid, was a ‘delicately organised creature’ who died of a nasty miscarriage and chloral poisoning when ...”

“... first experience of West Side Story (in New York!), and the good food served on the post-war Queen Elizabeth (porridge, kedgeree and kippers for breakfast, a cup of bouillon at 11, tea, crumpets and cakes at four). The vignettes of the famous he has dealt with combine the fluttering adulation of the literary groupy with remembered episodes of quite stunning ...”

“... different from them. Eagleton’s reading of the so-called Anglo-Irish novel, from Edgeworth to Elizabeth Bowen, is based on this analysis, although the analysis itself comes in for a good deal of interrogation on the way. It is part of his understanding that material realities (e.g. land) are so differently understood in the British and the Irish ...”

“... that acclaimed productions of The Tempest (by Macready in 1838) and Midsummer Night’s Dream (by Elizabeth Vestris in 1840) must have prepared the public for paintings that took scenes from these plays as their subject, and it cannot be a coincidence that Maclise’s Undine (one of the few key pictures missing from the exhibition) was painted in the same ...”

“... descriptions evoke the excitement of occasions such as that on which ‘novelist’s daughter’ Elizabeth Mary Somerset Maugham married Mr Vincent Paravicini in a green and white lamé creation by Schiaparelli carrying a ‘crescent bouquet of mixed white flowers’ by Flower Decorations Ltd. ‘London’s most original wedding for many years’ was Nancy ...”

“... lover), were active in the women’s suffrage and anti-imperialism movements. They did not, as Elizabeth Hardwick put it, ‘remain on the upper deck’.The third and final room at Charleston is devoted to Hamnett’s drawings, many of them from the late 1910s. There are sketches from life-drawing classes, Paris café scenes and a rather vulnerable ...”

“... de force. Most memorable is the chapter which looks at Joseph Mankiewicz’s film Cleopatra, the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton extravaganza of 1962. Hughes-Hallett shows how the extraordinary popular appeal of this film was related to the personalities – as they were perceived by the public – of Taylor and Burton themselves. They did not just play ...”

“... of garlic, and John Minton’s seductive, and faintly Post-Impressionist, illustrations to Elizabeth David. Brooke, after the war, heads for the Mediterranean as fast as he possibly can, but, being Brooke, he is already deeply nostalgic for his Army days there and strives to reanimate certain epiphanic moments – with no success whatever. In his ...”

“... are and what, by dint of that fact, they are prone to do to each other and to women. In 1817, Mrs Elizabeth Inchbald pronounced: ‘This is a play which all men admire and which most women dislike.’ There is, in that sense, a beautiful irony in Lloyd’s choice of Henry IV as the second in her projected trilogy of all-female Shakespeare performances. Of ...”

“... radicalism. The pattern of industrialisation served to publicise the divide, as suggested by Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South, published in 1855; while in the early 21st century, Conservative MPs have become a scarcely less endangered species in north-eastern England than they are in Scotland, and are under pressure too in the ...”

“... such as the Lockean philosopher Catharine Cockburn, the bluestocking moralist Catharine Talbot and Elizabeth Montagu, the ‘Queen of the Blues’ – and their defence of female morals. With maternal devotion as their example, they carolled women’s ‘disinterested benevolence’ and ethical intuition. Their arguments were influential but hazardous. Taken ...”