“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Most of the gains that women have made over the last decades have come about when women have taken a share of positions and opportunities hitherto reserved, by law or by custom, for men. And it is when this happens that we tend to get the most immediate and vivid sense that things have changed for both women and men. (The visibility of women in the US Army produces this sense in me, a Briton living in the US: it makes the British Army now seem peculiar ...”

“... of the novel we hear of the murder of a local mill-owner’s son – an event that was to inspire Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. Yet, though it can be readily situated in terms of a public history, the material of this absorbing novel – a sort of 19th-century handmaid’s tale – is bizarre enough. What will happen to the seven young women so ...”

“... getting to the end of their shelf-life) and to the fulsome praise of the then highly influential Elizabeth Bowen. Soon after the book’s publication its author wrote modestly and accurately of her gift. I quote from Diaries: ‘I do not think I have any “creative” genius. Whatever I have, if I have anything, is the capacity to recognise things. If I ...”

“... doctrine and practice of mental reservation which was particularly advocated by the Jesuits. While Elizabeth I, unlike contemporary Catholic sovereigns, never instituted any heresy prosecutions or conducted a general inquisition into religious beliefs, her government did demand conformity to the national Church, with fines for non-attendance, the requirement ...”

“... their talents; ‘The Psychopathology of the Sofa’ is the subtitle. A Butterfly Under a Stone by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She and her sisters, unknown to her father, brothers and later, her husband, befriended a poor girl dying of tuberculosis in ‘The Rookeries’, which were, after all, not a mile from their house. This fine and compassionate novel was ...”

“... about what we disapprove of in real life. The two Amises continued co-existing. When he married Elizabeth Jane Howard they went to live in a big house near Barnet, a matriarchal establishment largely run, it seemed, by his new mother and brother-in-law. Amis rejoiced in this set-up, which seemed to come quite naturally to him. Not in the least the squire or ...”

“... Dead’. Hardy, Hemingway and Lawrence are given some close attention, too, and so is Elizabeth Bowen’s only famous story, ‘Mysterious Kôr’. At one point Bayley remarks, almost in incidental fashion, that ‘the mysteries and queries of art are in their nature no different from those we encounter in living with and experiencing other ...”

“... of these years is quite clear, much as it is in American poets writing at the same time, like Elizabeth Bishop; it is Oskar’s legacy, the intrusion of self-consciousness. Given Grass’s involvement with the Social Democrats, and the hundreds of podium speeches he delivered for them in the 1965 electoral campaign, the publication of his third book was ...”

“... is he with this empty trope that he rearranges it several times within the next four pages. Elizabeth Taylor sitting up late at night is presumed to be ‘watching the falling stars with a certain sense of sympathetic identification’, while other guests show contempt on discovering that ‘Jagger, despite the waves of women he had rolled ...”

“... valid. In exactly the same way – as Vasari himself implies at several points in his text, and as Elizabeth McGrath conclusively demonstrated at a conference several years ago, in a paper which is still to be published – many of the ‘meanings’ which the artist applied to his frescoes in Florence can’t have occurred to him or to his advisers when they ...”