“... out still. Such stories here – and there are good ones by slightly older writers, such as Elizabeth Jolley, Olga Masters, Judah Waten – bring out something important in the nature of the form. It can carry an immense charge of social implication provided this remains immanent and tacit, visible only in the perspective and depth. Any attempt to make ...”

“... Hardy wrote in 1914 of his feeling ‘that we are living in a more brutal age than that, say, of Elizabeth’, which ‘does not inspire one to write hopeful poetry, or even conjectural prose, but simply make[s] one sit still in an apathy, and watch the clock spinning backwards’. For Henry James, the war seemed ‘to undo everything’: ‘My sense of what ...”

“... when you are in a different literary mood). Maureen Duffy traced Aphra-Eaffry Johnson’s parents, Elizabeth and Bartholomew (as the register spells him) Johnson, and much of their ancestry, and set out all the information, with proper scholarly caution and modesty as well as detail, in her Aphra Behn biography, The Passionate Shepherdess, which was published ...”

“... and notes, of very different dates, which Nietzsche’s dreadful sister, the energetic anti-semite Elizabeth, put together from his Nachlass according to an outline – only one of many different such plans – which Nietzsche had written on one sheet of paper for a book of that title. The Will to Power is a deeply interesting and powerful collection of ...”

“... attention from the Prince – who is not like Charles, although his mother is unmistakably Elizabeth II. Robina is now in the custody of her rich London uncle. He sponsors her debut into society, but has the ulterior motive of poncing for the lecherous (but physically under-endowed) Prince. Robina puts up another spirited defence of her maidenhood. The ...”

“... liberty. Private Papers makes the most responsible and unexpected use of Emily Brontë and of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But it is Robert Browning who fails to furnish the one thing needed, and this is where the novel fails. The dramatic monologue, after all, grew out of the epistolary novel. Forster is writing essentially an epistolary novel for the age ...”

“... occasion upon which he was generally, although not by everybody, held to have been worsted by Miss Elizabeth Anscombe, a young lady who smoked cigars, combined Roman Catholicism with logical positivism, and was on her way to becoming Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Lewis himself wrote to a friend, Dom Bede Griffiths, that Miss Anscombe had completely ...”

“... Girl’, probably the greatest image of blithe girlhood in European art, and the portrait of Elizabeth Salter, signed and dated 1744, formal and highly finished, but exquisitely relaxed. I have looked and looked but can find no colour-plate of lovely Mrs Salter in either book. I find that both biographers tend to fish out quaint arguments in defence of ...”

“... entries, of which three-quarters are people, from Aalto to Zuckermann, taking in Fidel Castro, Elizabeth David, Erskine Childers, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Robert Byron, Lawrence Durrell, Le Corbusier, Malcolm MacDonald, Tambimuttu ... and Donald Maclean. It is completely typical of the whole book that Maclean (whom he knew at school at Gresham’s) is ...”

“... usually lopped of political topicality. (Yet Richard II itself had just such topicality, as Queen Elizabeth fierily insisted.) The performance here of Richard II makes much of the parents’ dual vision of their child-actors. ‘Do you prefer Robert on the throne or at the wicket?’ It is this, too, which underlies the prolonged, though thwarted, movement ...”

“... it goes with the note to ‘The Dream of the Lion’, one of ‘Two Poems for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’, in which the Laureate mentions ‘my boyhood fanatic patriotism’. So everything is as it should be. What a happy coincidence, in its way, that a poet as good as Hughes should believe, and deeply and passionately, all the things ...”

“... far from orthodox, but it was widely influential on the later development of 19th-century poetry. Elizabeth Barrett Browning had little formal schooling, but her privately-garnered learning enabled her to announce her credentials as a serious poet with a translation of Prometheus Bound. Even Ruskin, in general no admirer of Classical tradition in his early ...”

“... surprising that Liddell should be the author of a critical study of Miss Pym, and of a memoir of Elizabeth Taylor and Ivy Compton Burnett. When Elsa, ‘now every inch a stepmother’, finally destroys herself on a stage metaphorically littered with corpses, the boys survive. They have recognised her as one of Greek tragedy’s monstrous, deranged ...”

“... entry, which seems to have been commoner under Edward IV than it became again until late in Elizabeth’s reign, seems to fit Elizabeth Russell’s picture better than it fits Lawrence Stone’s. It was not until after 1600 that it became normal practice for Havering gentlemen to send their sons to university. One of ...”

“... London, the latter represented by 131,000 items. It has also purchased the archive of the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, Amis’s second wife. The Huntington’s Rare Book Room closes for an hour at noon and most of its readers stroll across the gardens to a shaded outdoor restaurant. Amis would barely recognise as lunch the meal most of us eat here: nobody ...”