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“... 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 ...”

“... just as a broken control knob can evoke what is wrong with the world. In a bristling essay on Elizabeth Smart for the Dublin-based literary magazine Gorse, Bennett expressed a dislike of ‘accomplished’ writing: ‘I have a fancy for a rather more dappled conflation of vagueness and exactitude, flippancy and earnestness, aplomb and ...”

“... and Rodeo for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1942. But this new score, commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation in July 1942, was not for a ballet company but for Graham, America’s high priestess of modern dance. The ‘inner life’ that emerged was complex. The dance, a tribute to land and liberty, faith and fervour, had the look ...”

“... of commitment to Freedom of Information among the ICO’s top brass. The current commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, dedicated only half a page to FOI in her latest annual report. Such indifference is not altogether surprising: the commissioner raises twelve times her FOI budget from the levying of data protection fines on businesses. (During the ...”

“... Carmen exhumed and gave a new lease of life to writers such as Rebecca West, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Comyns and Antonia White. White’s Frost in May, another study of the horrors of convent life, was one of Virago’s first notable successes when it was reissued in 1978. Other writers she championed had truly been forgotten: on Desert ...”

“... but I enjoyed it. I thought I was too grand to do interviews, but then I was asked to interview Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of some film. So I said, what the hell, I’ll do it. That initited the interviewing period of my life: I remember coming back and thinking. ‘It’s an absolute doddle, interviewing’ – I mean. ...”

“... In Elizabeth Taylor’s novel The Wedding Group, published in 1968, there is a grand old painter called Harry Bretton. He is modelled, I would guess, on Eric Gill, for the Life, and Stanley Spencer, for the Work. Musing by the studio window, he considers his place in history: Turner was the greatest English painter, and was safely dead, did not encroach or suggest comparisons ...”

“... man. For him Philby and Co are the modern equivalents of heroic Jesuit priests plotting against Elizabeth. In Le Carré’s world the dingy agents of the KGB and MI6 are interchangeable. Who can forget A.J.P. Taylor’s jibe that no spy ever told his masters anything of value they could not have gleaned from the press? Or Malcolm Muggeridge’s chronicles ...”

“... a case that the novelists had signed up for any of these support systems. The distinction between Elizabeth Bennet and her father is a wide one, in the light of the moral intelligence Jane Austen cares about. This is a truth felt by both characters, by others in the book and by its readers; felt not as a violation of the democratic contract, but as a fact of ...”

“... is provided by Alfred Bammesberger of Eichstätt University; there is a chapter on syntax by Elizabeth Closs Traugott (Stanford), one on semantics and vocabulary by Dieter Kastovsky (Vienna), on dialects by Thomas Toon (Ann Arbor), on onomastics by Cecily Clark (Cambridge), and on literary language by Malcolm Godden (Oxford). Volume Two, 1066-1476, is ...”

“... naval base; or Havana, where he once spent a single night, alone, in 1923; or, more realistically, Elizabeth Park, where, walking to and from his job in the classical pile of the Hartford, he composed most of his poems? What he is regretting seems likely to be something else. Most likely – no se puede vivir sin amar – a lack of love, to answer my own unput ...”