“... about what we disapprove of in real life. The two Amises continued co-existing. When he married Elizabeth Jane Howard they went to live in a big house near Barnet, a matriarchal establishment largely run, it seemed, by his new mother and brother-in-law. Amis rejoiced in this set-up, which seemed to come quite naturally to him. Not in the least the squire or ...”

“... of these years is quite clear, much as it is in American poets writing at the same time, like Elizabeth Bishop; it is Oskar’s legacy, the intrusion of self-consciousness. Given Grass’s involvement with the Social Democrats, and the hundreds of podium speeches he delivered for them in the 1965 electoral campaign, the publication of his third book was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... clubs of St James’s, and in turn smashed shopfronts. Writing to his patron, the society hostess Elizabeth Lewis, Whistler made his allegiance clear. He expressed ‘great indignation’ that his correspondent might have become ‘one of the victims of the brutality of “The People” in the Park – How horrible!’ By ‘The People’ (an odd term of ...”

“... broken into the house of Sir Walter Cope. There was the woman from Finsbury accused of ‘cozening Elizabeth Barnes of certain money for a little powder in a paper’: she had promised that Elizabeth ‘should have her purpose of musicon by carryenge the powder about her’, apparently meaning it would attract some musician ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in public discourse. And there’s plenty of that silencing still going on. We need only think of Elizabeth Warren being prevented a few weeks ago from reading out a letter by Coretta Scott King in the US Senate.1 What was extraordinary on that occasion wasn’t only that she was silenced and formally excluded from the debate (I don’t know enough about the ...”