“... 1975, by Mary McCarthy, as The Life of the Mind. The question that crops up, unstated, throughout Elizabeth Young – Bruehl’s lengthy and thorough biography, and in Bhikhu Parekh’s Hannah Arendt Made Simple, is this: how much of the Sixties survives to the Eighties? She comes across, certainly, as a good egg. She looks out of the back cover of Dr ...”

“... rulers had long been alert to the possibility of veiled political allusion on the stage. Under Elizabeth, a principal target of suspicion had been the English history play. Why did that genre decline after her death, in a period when public interest in history was increasing? Had history become too sensitive an area for the drama? Were playwrights who ...”

“... liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important public intellectuals in the 1790s. The last third ...”

“... and passes the days in Mrs Thrale’s coterie at Streatham. She records the bluestocking salons of Elizabeth Montagu (material for some savage vignettes in The Witlings). Garrick frequently turns up at the Burney home in Leicester Fields to entertain them with his impersonations. One evening Omai, the Tahitian tribal chief, comes to dinner (her brother James ...”

“... the Don Carlos story? Certainly he fell, received a visit from the dead monk and recovered, but as Elizabeth King and David Todd detail, the supposed origin of the machine is supported more by circumstantial evidence than positive proof; it’s an ‘elegant hypothesis’, the authors conclude. More interesting than the clockwork Diego’s uncertain ...”

“... spend many anxious years trying to fill. The experience of death, which also took his sisters Elizabeth and Jane, was decisive for Thomas, and not healed by the simultaneous experience of having a cold mother. Elizabeth de Quincey was Evangelical, rather aloof, and able, in the manner of Evangelicals, to shield her ...”

“... much more arbitrary than the longer critical haul of a century or two. For instance, shares in Elizabeth Bishop (d. 1979) are at an all-time high, helped by the timely publication of her letters; while shares in Philip Larkin (d. 1985) are at an all-time low, helped by the untimely publication of his ditto. Graham Greenes (d. 1991) are on the way ...”

“... porous rather than diachronically self-contained; McGann’s ‘socialisation of texts’ and Elizabeth Eisenstein’s ‘printing press as an agent of change’ personify objects. Even the title of Darnton’s ground-breaking study of 18th-century French publishing, The Business of Enlightenment, exemplifies book historians’ flair for ...”

“... Presbyterianism to the freedoms of continental Europe. Married to an attractive but unstable man, Elizabeth Shand is told by her cosmopolitan sister-in-law, Elise, that ‘You and I, Elizabeth, would make one damned fine woman between us.’ The two end up running off to the Continent together, though whether their ...”

“... to what both Donne and his modern critics reacted against: the conventional poetry of the Court of Elizabeth. Hence what might be called the Return of the Sonnet. It is studied now, not with the old Edwardian belletrism, but for its capacity to illuminate the whole courtly milieu within which the Petrarchan modes had their function, social and even ...”

“... As far as the central drama was concerned, I was wholly on the side of Mary, and wholly against Elizabeth. Elizabeth was a recurrent figure of loathing, occupying a place in my historical animosities on a par with that later to be filled by Churchill. I had my reasons. First, she was a patriot. Second, as I was to learn ...”

“... incestuous, Austen reserves the excitement of conflict for those characters erotically attracted: Elizabeth and Darcy, Emma and Knightley.But these arguments are unnecessary given a simple fact. Sense and Sensibility is not about two sisters; it is about three sisters. 19-year-old Elinor and 17-year-old Marianne have a sister, the 13-year-old ...”

“... from the spice shops on Hester Street and ate dim sum from carts at the big Chinese palace on Elizabeth Street. And sometimes, they woke up early and went to the flea markets in Chelsea, looking for the old cameras that Curtis collected, or the rotting furs that Emily loved to try on, Curtis snapping her photo as she made faces in the mirror. Passages ...”

“... Skouras took Khrushchev on with an argument about capitalism. Judy Garland wanted more drinks. Elizabeth Taylor said she wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Then it was off to the set of Can-Can, and its star, Shirley MacLaine. She was certainly more amused than Khrush, who thought it was shockingly decadent to see women dancing with their bottoms ...”

“... palaces. The chapter on the Dutch War is interrupted by a discussion of Rochester’s abduction of Elizabeth Mallet. This is treated as an escapade, although abduction was the statutory equivalent of rape and Mallet’s male relations would have been acquitted had they killed the earl on the spot. But the king forgave his friend’s transgression and so does ...”