“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”