“... but with the best will in the world he could find only four, ‘and one of those was Queen Elizabeth.’ Another was Anne Askew, who says in a noble ballad ‘made and sang when she was in Newgate’: Not oft use I to write In prose nor yet in rhyme. A necessary note tells us that she was a Protestant martyr, tortured and burned in her 25th year for ...”

“... though it is hard to imagine an occasion, but she would have let no one know, not even her sister. Elizabeth Bowen took a similarly tough view of friends as family, whereas the professional friend-seeker never tries to find one within the domestic circle. In The Death of the Heart the author muses that ‘we have no absent friends,’ and in The Little ...”

“... London crew, he got invited to country houses for weekends and was often to be found dining at the Elizabeth. In other words, although the Oxford of his fantasies had largely disappeared, he made a good show of pretending that it hadn’t. He was aware that the majority of Oxford undergraduates were ex-grammar school boys who had never read a word of Ancient ...”

“... And in the half-century since his death, the royal roll-call has been further extended. Queen Elizabeth II is his great-great-niece, King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden is his great-great-grandson, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark is one great-great-granddaughter, and the former Queen Anne-Marie of Greece is another. To describe him as well connected would be ...”

“... the news of death into the narrative. Sometimes this is literally done, as when the butler in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, with his face ‘blanched to a dead whiteness’, brings the news of Harry Carson’s murder to his family. More often, the implication of mortality is carried in the mute presence of their inexorable work, as it is in the ...”

“... an amalgam of genuinely outstanding women and those who merely stand out. There is Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, who is, we are told, ‘engaged to a Peruvian senator’; there is Lili Town-send, who organises ‘human dolphin interactions’ in Florida in between practising spiritual therapy; and there is Dianne Brill, who ‘has created as much of ...”

“... his fellow émigrés arrange a permanent job for him at the University of Chicago. There he meets Elizabeth Mann Borgese, who introduces him to her father. Heidegger manages to overcome his initial suspicion of the Hanseatic darling of fortune, and Mann his initial suspicion of the Schwarzwald Bauerkind. They find they agree with each other, and with Adorno ...”

“... Waugh but to Rebecca West and Arnold Bennett – the young and the old alike – H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Anthony Powell. In his time Gerhardie was at least as potent a literary influence in England as Hemingway, and more pervasive, more part of the new metropolitan air that English authors breathed: they absorbed him as Dostoevsky ...”

“... as a cloth cap, reassuring them that it is smart to be philistine if you make smug jokes about it. Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, the Director, declares that the slogan is ‘absolutely magnificent’ because it is ‘targeted at a particular age group (18-35) and it certainly has increased the awareness of the museum in that age-group.’ Meanwhile, however, Charles ...”

“... enclosure riot was. Only seven out of 107 riots that found their way into Manning’s sources in Elizabeth I’s reign involved more than 30 people (which did not stop the vengeful queen from recommending the use of martial law as the quickest way of bringing such ‘incorrigible rogues’ to the gallows). The Queen’s bloodymindedness reflects a general ...”

“... debts and lawsuits. Like other Jacobin writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays and Elizabeth Inchbald, she was defining for herself attitudes which were just starting to be termed ‘radical’: beliefs connecting the private with the national life and so politicising sex and the family. During her last illness she was still working on ...”

“... 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 ...”