“... fiction and non-fiction and for liberating biography from Victorian trammels. He compares it with Elizabeth and Essex, Some People and I, Claudius and would have us see it as tethered to none of the genres, whether biography, history or fiction. Thus, ‘Peterley Harvest is not in fact a forgery but one of those “fakes” that present autobiographical ...”

“... In the introduction to their translation of the Italian Journey (1962), W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer sought to explain and excuse British ignorance of, and indifference to, Goethe by drawing attention to the undeniable fact that his work is particularly resistant to translation into English. This is to be expected in the case of Goethe’s lyric ...”

“... of Speech and Drama in power: an actress brilliant at each part she prates: St Francis, Boadicea, Elizabeth I, Florence Nightingale. As the farce turns to tragedy, changes of role will grow more frequent, sincerity and conviction deepen: ‘Count not her broken promises as a crime. She meant them how she meant them at the time’ – a trap into which ...”

“... that is – or perhaps one should say as reading matter. Reviewing Peter Manso’s Mailer, Elizabeth Hardwick went into the question, moral and aesthetic, of the taped book. The genre, with Mayhew as its godfather, began with the best intentions. ‘The sequential interviewer is likely to reign over the text in the benevolent and more or less ...”

“... uninhabited, and with rabbits scampering over the great steps before the main entrance. Elizabeth Bowen, another Anglo-Irishwoman, applauds the sangfroid and ingenuity of the ‘big house’ people who refused to relinquish the reputation that dogged them, that of being ‘the heartless rich’, while struggling to stay solvent and keep a watertight ...”

“... poetry, biography had only recently begun its career, but such experiments as Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex or A.J.A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo pointed the way to further discoveries. Richard Holmes’s Footsteps is another such experiment, and an enterprising example of biography-in-action that may be read at several levels of literary and ...”

“... doorway gives all but the medical details. The poet and his lady, I like to believe, were the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of the day, if not the Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, with knobs on. Centuries pass. La maison is up for rent. Appears out of nowhere, circa 1909, exactly as in the central London of our own day, an American ...”

“... I was recently quite shocked – though I’m not sure why – when a cherished colleague upheld the study of women’s history on the grounds that it was ‘fashionable’. Most historians respond to contemporary trends in their discipline, though without being so frank about it. Would I have been as disturbed if he had defended his researches on Medieval literacy in similar terms? I suspect myself of reacting not to his reason for endorsing the subject but to the subject itself ...”

“... on non-European cuisines, and often deeply serious, as in his frank and affectionate profiles of Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden, Alan Davidson and Christopher Driver. Above all, he has an endearingly amateur – in both senses – quality. Symptomatic of this is a detail volunteered by Ann Barr in her introduction. She tells us, with a pregnant use of the ...”

“... the Gonzaga and Medici princes to revive the glories of Greece and ‘muovere gli affetti’. If Elizabeth and James had the same potential experience of how to do it – for their court masques were no less elaborate than the intermedii of Northern Italy – they had not the intellectual grasp or desire. This was one decisive delaying factor. Another was ...”

“... air and open road (‘going one knows not where’) literature of all kinds: in the summer of 1907 Elizabeth von Arnim took a large party, including E.M. Forster, through Sussex by caravan, while the Neo-Pagans were camping out in the New Forest. Even so, with the rent of his cottage ‘a quarterly worry’, Edward Thomas had to make ends meet with the ...”

“... he little believes, who aye in winsome life/Abides ’midst burghers some heavy business’). Elizabeth Bishop is a delight to read; Thom Gunn contributes a charming piece on surfriding; and Marianne Moore, considering the sea as a grave, has a linethe birds swim through the air top speed,            uttering catcalls as hereforethat ...”

“... of its Offenders’ Book. Is it Mary Colliford’s historical due to be remembered for calling Elizabeth Lugge, the spinning teacher, ‘gig, runagate, speakarse and baggage’? We are told nothing else about her; maybe nothing else may be known. John White wrote of most people being ‘known too well to the world to love the smoke of their own ...”

“... scant half-crust. (“That bread alone was worth the journey,” they probably remark, just as Elizabeth David says of a trip to an out-of-the-way eatery in France.)’ This provoked disdain and wrath on the Letters page, and a response from Angela in the shape of a postcard from Austin, Texas. On the front was a picture of a violently steaming ...”

“... 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 ...”