“... 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 ...”

“... 1901 calls explicitly for the extermination of the ‘unfit’. Even feminist fantasies, such as Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s New Amazonia (1889), felt entitled to exclude those who reveal ‘the slightest trace of disease or malformation’. In view of this background, it comes as less of a shock than it might have been to find a passage from Mein Kampf ...”

“... not run, or were driven out of the race, or have been occluded, by the sheer influence of cash. Elizabeth Dole and Dan Quayle have already withdrawn for this reason, unable to match George W. Bush’s initial and crushing (and for a while, sole) announcement that he had $36 million already acquired from private donors to spend on the acquisition of the ...”

“... six entries, one a mere pastiche of Churchillian rhetoric. Churchill himself gets three, Queen Elizabeth I three. Auberon Waugh gets a place, next to Art Buchwald who gets one for the quip ‘Old soldiers never die – they just write their memoirs.’ A 16th-century Grand Inquisitor, in a different vein of seriousness, is in for: ‘When a man speaks the ...”

“... the record, History seems to inspire good, gloomy aphorisms: ‘Makes of men date, like cars’ (Elizabeth Bowen); ‘Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else’ (Heywood Broun); ‘History books begin and end, but the events they describe do not’ (Collingwood); ‘When smashing monuments, save the pedestals – they always come in ...”

“... no one represented in this book is – and very funny about women’s insistence on the human; Elizabeth Taylor on Ivy Compton-Burnett (1951), remarking that her heroine’s bi-nominal titles can make reading a solicitor on ‘Landlords and Tenants’ an exciting prospect. Infected as one is bound to be by the style of a writer that one admires enough to ...”

“... breath that in a family follows the departure of a particularly tiresome and exacting house guest. Elizabeth David herself – a veteran by marriage of wartime Cairo and pre-Independence Delhi – advised her readers thirty years ago: ‘Devote all the time and resources at your disposal to the building up of a fine kitchen. It will be, as it should be, the ...”

“... as his authority the assertion of Helen Thomas that it was about her husband’s mother, Mary Elizabeth Thomas. My own reaction is that, faced by such a bitterly humiliating statement as the poem unequivocally makes, any woman would persuade herself and tell others that it was about her mother-in-law. Andrew Motion is judicious, demonstrating by the ...”

“... of pointless visitings. Dorothy Shakespear, one sometimes feels, was not much less imprisoned than Elizabeth Barrett had been, and in not much less need of a poet-errant to liberate her. Neither the captive nor her would-be liberator wasted much time complaining: these were the rules of the game, and the two of them could only be patient. Patience is not what ...”

“... as she sometimes saw herself, and as she wished to be seen, as the political reincarnation of Elizabeth I, and as the central inspirational figure of her reign, who to a large extent personally determined its political dynamics, and – ‘for 12 hectic years – succeeded in overcoming the limitations of her sex and ill-health to impose her views on the ...”

“... the Tudor demesne of Richmond to create a landscape garden: a cave with wax statues of Merlin and Elizabeth I suggested the culmination of Arthurian prophecy in the Hanoverian monarchy. Frederick Louis, Caroline’s unpopular son, and his wife Augusta attempted to rival this display, planning a Mount of Parnassus, a House of Confucius and a Physic Garden. But ...”

“... counterparts in human desire. What would become of literature if Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, Billy Budd and John Claggart, had been able to communicate perfectly from the beginning? Lacan has put it succinctly: ‘There is no sexual relation.’ Which is to say: the sexual relation is literary. This is not to argue that it ...”