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“... has insider status. The cover of the American paperback of The Chateau reproduces the praise of Elizabeth Bowen; the novel’s epigraph is taken from Elizabeth Bowen; it is dedicated to an ‘E.B.’ This new edition of All the Days and Nights quotes the praise of Eudora Welty, to whom one of the stories is ...”

“... and thus the presentation of fashion, changed. The magazines used more photographs, and those drew on personal fantasies more often than on social ones. Where you were going no longer predicted what you would go in. Plotting the transformations of the feminine and the female in modern fashion, Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton use photographs which turn ...”

“... Protestant ideas had established only a superficial hold in England, the case goes, Cardinal Pole drew back from the strenuous evangelisation that was so urgently needed, and refused help from the Jesuits because he ‘simply did not want men with the fire of the Counter-Reformation in their bellies’. Over the last twenty years, this negative consensus has ...”

“... overheated version of Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), Clift lets the women take centre-stage; it’s Elizabeth Taylor’s film, then Katharine Hepburn’s. Here, as in Freud, he’s a ‘listener’. Of all the early films, it’s in the last, Vittorio De Sica’s excellent (though butchered) Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953) that Clift takes the greatest ...”

“... a hundred pages before reaching the marriage, the coronation (splendidly described), the birth of Elizabeth. Along this road, Cardinal Wolsey falls by the wayside, the victim of his own honest miscalculation (he, too, could hardly believe what was happening) and Anne’s ruthlessness. An obscure bureaucrat called Thomas Cromwell appears on the ...”

“... his response to the felt pressures of both private readers (notably, though not exclusively, Elizabeth Barrett) and public critics. It is this element of ‘interaction’, Woolford argues, which represented, in Browning’s own eyes, ‘his revision of Romantic poetics, and stimulated his progressive revision of poetic form’ (‘progressive’ here ...”

“... Richard Topcliffe, chief ‘poursuivant’ or persecutor of Jesuit missionaries in the reign of Elizabeth I. Topcliffe is perhaps not much spoken of except by historians of the Catholic martyrs or close students of Donne, who mentioned him in passing but deleted the allusion. He wasn’t one of your bully-boys or guttersnipes, but the son of a Lincolnshire ...”

“... Unit’s ‘brilliant adviser’; Kevin Stowe was a ‘very able’ Principal Private Secretary, Elizabeth Arnot a ‘bright young education specialist’, John Lyons a ‘very able’ general secretary, and Tom McNally an ‘excellent political secretary’. They were all quite wonderful, brilliant and magnificent, but unfortunately they could not tackle ...”

“... Immensely thin and hollow-eyed with long fingers and a large nose, he seemed to the actress Elizabeth Robins, who met him at a lunch party, to be merely the ‘uncertain ghost of Oscar’. Tate Britain’s exhibition (until 20 September) demonstrates how deceptive the cultivated appearance was, revealing the sheer scale of Beardsley’s industry and the ...”

“... she knew how to please the paymaster. Poems such as ‘The Bas Bleu’ eulogised the bluestockings Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Carter who had made her welcome (the wealthy Montagu was one of her patrons); and when she started lecturing ‘the great’ on their propensity for drinking, gambling and having their hair done ...”

“... to imagine ways of organising care beyond the family unit. In the 19th century, Charles Fourier drew up blueprints for ‘phalansteries’, self-contained communities of around a thousand people who would undertake all the necessary tasks (children would be looked after in the ‘noisy area’, next to the carpenters and blacksmiths). Jane Sophia Appleton ...”

“... was, apparently, the response of one American visitor to a portrait of Edith Sitwell in the Tate. Elizabeth Bowen, herself an imposing physical presence, described Sitwell in real life as like ‘a high altar on the move’, and Virginia Woolf, on first encountering her in 1918, noted that she was ‘a very tall young woman, wearing a permanently startled ...”

“... Protestants, many puritans had unrealistic expectations of her successor. They therefore detested Elizabeth I’s church settlement of 1559, with its concessions to Lutherans and Catholics, including the requirements that ministers wear priestly vestments and accept Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. Church government was another bugbear. Allegiance ...”

“... as those who have discerned this rebellion contriving from (if not before) the death of Queen Elizabeth’. One wonders what he would have made of Stone’s lectures, in which we were taken back to the reign of Henry VIII, and learned as much about population movements and the educational system as about religion and politics. It was the total history of ...”

“... encounter in St Luke’s Gospel between the expectant Virgin Mary and her sixty-year-old cousin Elizabeth, improbably pregnant, in the days before IVF, with John the Baptist. The Visitation is the Second Joyful Mystery of the rosary. For those who grew up in Catholic Ireland, it was also a cautionary tale: if it happened to them, it could happen to ...”