“... 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 ...”

“... Guin, whose ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ adapts a concept from the American anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher: that the first real ‘cultural device’ was not a weapon or a tool but a container. As Le Guin puts it: ‘We’ve all heard all about the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we ...”

“... to canonised titans like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, but to contemporary Black poets: Elizabeth Alexander and Terrance Hayes; Harryette Mullen, Reginald Dwayne Betts and Evie Shockley. (He is one of the few young poets who has learned from Hayes without copying him.) But if Charleston represents a new generation of Black writers, he faces similar ...”

“... In 1961, William Maxwell accepted the first story she submitted to the New Yorker, the fragrant, Elizabeth Bishop-like ‘Woollahra Road’. She published two collections: Cliffs of Fall (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). The latter – a series of linked stories about the UN (‘the Organisation’) – is written with a mordant, Waughish ...”

“... and love each other,’ but restricts her anger to a few sniping comments. ‘Wreckers’ features Elizabeth, who can barely get out of bed. Her husband’s inability to ‘look at her body . . . with the love and desire she craved’ is a product of her emotional isolation. Then there is Shelley in ‘Refuge’, who routinely embarrasses her teenage son with ...”

“... a reader of The Penelopiad might well wonder what Helen would have to say in reply. In Achilles, Elizabeth Cook’s 2001 recasting of the Iliad, Helen’s beauty is more of a curse than a blessing: it causes her to be raped, resented and intolerably lonely. Yet it is also – and this is something that every version of the story seems able to agree on ...”

“... the Booker should favour. Ah, that would explain the exclusion of Coetzee’s novel of ideas, Elizabeth Costello – not up to the Hornby level. To be fair to him, the former Merton Professor is not slumming; he’s bought the place and moved right in. But prize-winners should not be blamed for prizes, any more than gnats for standing water, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... first literary magazine, the Athenian Mercury, in 1694. His find was a young woman from Somerset, Elizabeth Singer, who sent in poems praising King William. She was hailed and adored in print as ‘Philomela’ or the ‘Pindarical Lady in the West’, and exhorted to ‘Sing, bright maid! Thus and yet louder sing thy God and King!’ Barker would have cut ...”