“... 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 ...”

“... distract sailors or bring bad luck at sea – which was just as well, because a topless carving of Elizabeth Fry or Florence Nightingale would certainly have been frowned on. Fry, who adorned a Victorian merchant ship, is depicted wearing a piecrust-collar shirt and bulky masculine jacket; Nightingale, from a similar vessel, has a capable-looking face with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... reserved, not for adultery, but for indiscretion. She condoned her father’s liaison with Lady Elizabeth Foster, accepted his subsequent marriage to her, but blamed her severely for her impudence in publicly avowing the parentage of their illegitimate children. So far, Lady Granville was only conforming to the standards of her coterie. But her judgment in ...”

“... of a novel by Aldous Huxley or Simone de Beauvoir. It is about as full of gossip as a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. In composing his autobiography, Pontalis made a very explicit choice of genre. He cast it, deliberately and decisively, in the lyrical, not in the narrative, mode. Indeed, not only would it be impossible to reconstruct even the outlines of ...”

“... fraternities to royal progresses. Festivity could be used to serve political purposes too, as Elizabeth I and James I realised: they resurrected older festive traditions or invented new ones, developing them into cults and electing themselves as the chief divinities. In his discussion of periodic jollifications Laroque is judicious, superbly informed and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Catching the voices of servants themselves is not easy, though the occasional one rings out. Elizabeth Hands, writing about the disdainful surprise that news of her writing met with, was especially tart: ‘A servant write verses!’ says Madame du Bloom ‘Pray what is the subject – a Mop or a Broom?’ ‘He, he, he,’ says Miss Flounce: ‘I ...”

“... utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South).’ The book they were talking about was Douglas Crase’s The Revisionist. Out of print for almost forty years, it has now been reissued (Carcanet, £12.99) in a volume that also includes Crase’s only other collection of ...”

“... by precedent and by the constant repression of excess, partisanship and enthusiasm. Ever since Elizabeth I sacrificed her love life for the stability of the realm (deliberately casting shade on her lusty father’s reputation in the process), success as a monarch has been defined in popular culture largely as the uncomplaining suppression of private ...”

“... worked at Warhol’s Factory in New York, tangible evidence of which was a silkscreen head of Elizabeth Taylor on his wall. He was devoted to Forster and would often retell ‘Morgan’s latest’ bon mot or lightly scathing comment on one of the fellows, on whom he turned a rather sharp eye (including Michael Jaffé: ‘I can’t think Rubens would have ...”

“... of something horrible that was sticking to them. A spectacular daube at a dinner party, recipe by Elizabeth David but with a freehand addition by the cook, had it – lips this time pursed, thumb and forefinger connected to indicate perfection. A work of art, of course, had a je ne sais quoi, spoken with wide eyes and lips apart to perform a look of ...”