“... 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 ...”

“... The surprise is that instead of lecturing on Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore, all of whom he acknowledges as ‘major influences’, he discusses an eclectic group of 19th and 20th-century poets who for the most part have endured long periods of neglect: John Clare, Thomas Lovell ...”

“... begins classically, with a complete and pleasingly trivial catalogue of the thoughts of Elizabeth Reegan as she darns socks in the failing light before her stepchildren interrupt her with a routine that is, as we learn, their standard evening patter. The latest novel doesn’t depend in any such way on familiar fictional patterns, and there are few ...”

“... who had curtsied to Victoria. Yet the girls who grew up wearing ‘princess coats’ like Elizabeth and Margaret’s emerged from the season into a very different world and several came out not as swans but as viragos. Among MacCarthy’s near contemporaries at the Palace were Vanessa Redgrave, Rose Dugdale and Teresa ‘Hayter of the ...”

“... a Gulfstream. Her needs at this juncture had more in common with those of second-act sirens like Elizabeth Hurley than with those of anyone currently residing in Balmoral.Once the princess can’t feel the pea any more, not even when all but one of her mattresses have been whisked away, what is left but a dingy death in a concrete ...”

“... he knows what happens, after all. He has something of Crusoe, though not Defoe’s so much as Elizabeth Bishop’s sadder, more challenging, more ruminative character in her great poem ‘Crusoe in England’. Some of her lines – They named it. But my poor old island’s still      un-rediscovered, un-renamable. None of the books has ever got it ...”

“... 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 ...”