“... film, in which Emin returns to the sites of the experience, including the hospital, the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, named after one of the most courageous doctors to put women’s bodies at the centre of her concerns (it has since been pulled down to make way for apartments behind Unison’s grand new building on the Euston Road). Emin is very good ...”

“... of which he had become an editor, and with the Nonconformist zeal that shaped the writing of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her protest poem ‘The Cry of the Children’, whose sensational success helped to prepare the ground for the Factory Act of 1844, was influenced by Horne’s investigative work. Here, only death can make a girl happy: If you listen ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to make sense.Le Guin takes her cue from Woman’s Creation (1975), a book by the anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher, which argues that early humans survived mostly by foraging and gathering rather than hunting. From this Le Guin develops her ‘carrier bag theory of evolution’, putting forward the idea that the first cultural device was probably a container ...”

“... 1972 film The Death of Maria Malibran (Warhol encouraged her to take the part). Then came the full Elizabeth Taylor treatment, furs, premieres, restaurants (Darling was a traditionalist: ‘Restaurants should have carpets on the floor, upholstered seats and be dark’). She wasn’t interested in miniskirts: her idea of womanhood was embodied by Veronica ...”

“... period, a chest-flattening corset, known as a ‘pair of bodies’, was popular among elite women (Elizabeth I’s funeral effigy in 1603 wore bodies in fustian and leather); in the 18th century, stiff, whalebone-based stays were introduced, designed to shrink the waist and elevate the bosom. The Rijksmuseum has a rigid-looking example in scarlet embroidered ...”

“... is an establishment Democratic centrist who has never been an icon of the progressive left like Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. ‘Dumb as a rock’ and ‘low IQ’ – he may be the last person on earth who mentions IQ – had no traction, considering that the stars of MAGA include the congresswomen Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor ...”

“... and Leavis. He has given several long poems entire: the Rubáiyát, Clough’s Amours de Voyage, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese – but not a word of her Aurora Leigh – Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night and Meredith’s Modern Love – which Leavis despised as ‘the flashy product 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”