“... is the connection between Ruskin’s hatred of orchids and his views on Darwin? Why did he praise Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and not George Eliot?), that we need to focus more accurately. We get precious little of that kind of definition from Kemp. Instead, we are presented with a tiring stream of second-hand generalisations. One of the consequences of ...”

“... ought to like them. Stylistically, Seeing things is plain as plain, sometimes ‘awful plain’ (Elizabeth Bishop, ‘The Moose’). The gutturals of early Heaney are long gone, and now also the suave Latinity – or Latin suavity – of what one can now call his mid-period. The poems have the most pedestrian beginnings, often stumbling over themselves, with ...”

“... first-night party without inviting a single member of the cast, an achievement for which his wife Elizabeth offered to nominate him to the Guinness Book of Records. One remark I feel obliged to challenge concerns both my parents. Lilli Palmer, Wapshott alleges, ‘always said’ that her husband was homosexual. I am amply familiar with what my mother ...”

“... Austen, and posed New Age questions on the courtship rituals of Pride and Prejudice: ‘Suppose Elizabeth Bennet said to her parents: “I’ve found a life partner I really love, and she’s a woman”?’ Though I had asked for a modern hotel, with a telly and a minibar, my hosts were sure that I would enjoy The Morning Glory, a local guest house near the ...”

“... can further reflect that whereas in 1972 the three judges were Cyril Connolly, George Steiner and Elizabeth Bowen, in 1987 a television newscaster, by virtue of having written a biography of Viv Richards, was at least more ‘literary’ than one of the other judges. And then the novelists had better conclude that the only sensible attitude to the Booker is ...”

“... even necessarily to politeness.’ A notable debate took place in 1948 in the Socratic Club, when Elizabeth Anscombe – represented by Wilson as being as tough and unscrupulous in argument as Lewis himself – ‘thoroughly trounced’ him in argument, and showed up his inadequacy as a philosopher. This occasion seems to have had an extravagant effect on ...”

“... separates from her amicably and sends her back to England, where she becomes the Virgin Queen Elizabeth. Now we know that one of Philip’s four wives was English, but this was Mary Tudor. Moreover, a constant theme of the novel is that el Señor has no heir, and indeed dies heirless. Obviously Charles V had an heir, Philip II, and so did the historical ...”

“... for us: ‘Remember – the truth always sounds incredible ... don’t forget that everything Elizabeth [the dead woman] told people was true, and that was why nobody believed her.’ The devils here are entirely grammatical, can’t be caught out, and beyond grammar there is only silence or the unheard stories of women. There is a recurring act in the ...”

“... French, made the piece a tremendous success. The new King George VI went to see it with Queen Elizabeth shortly after their accession; and a few months later old Queen Mary – a true Aunt Edna type – came, too. That evening a slight hush fell on the house when Rex Harrison described Diana the man-eater as ‘a bitch’, but the old lady laughed ...”

“... and plain; the tone is like that in Yeats’s ‘Politics’, Larkin’s ‘The Trees’ or Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sonnet’, the short poem offering a sudden moment of realisation. Gunn has always written as though he trusted rhyme and was prepared to let its fall be blunt, if necessary – as in a ballad, or a poem by Hardy. In The Occasions of ...”

“... to have a complete holiday and no letters will be forwarded.’ (He had gone to join HMS Queen Elizabeth in Greece.) Presumably the Court Circular page did not mention his operation for piles, though the New York Times gave it a multi-deck headline containing the words ‘Dramatist Stricken.’ It would be no surprise, however, to find that Coward formally ...”

“... as Devotion in 1980. And the opposite, I imagine, would be more rhetorically exalted books: Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, of which, not too long ago, I was unable to read two pages, or maybe Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, of which I managed only a little more – even though I had expected to enjoy them both. The ...”

“... claim to the title to understand the tensions which were at stake. Already by the reign of Elizabeth I, it was recognised that a university MA made a man a gentleman, whatever his pedigree might be. That is the assumption on which today’s educational system is built: it is choosing the gentlemen (and the ladies also) of the next generation’s social ...”

“... roof-climbing could dissipate the calumny. Again he finds a useful epigraph, this time in Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.’ He is not one for self-analysis, but he says: ‘I was full of self-confidence when I first went to Eton ... Public school and three long years ...”

“... or the people who owned the National Poet had become a matter of fierce debate. In the reigns of Elizabeth and James I, ‘the theatres still continued to be powerful vehicles for the suppression of every generous principle of liberty,’ and ‘public exhibitions were made use of as vehicles of fulsome adulation to tyranny and oppression.’ This sounds ...”