“... focus on people, or to understand much about them. Here’s one example from The Pocket. In 1770 Elizabeth Warner, an unmarried servant, was charged with murdering her newborn daughter. Her afterbirth was concealed in a leather pocket, and her dead baby wrapped in some underclothes. Having informed us of this, the authors move on: you have to flip to an ...”

“... years in advance and she had a virtual monopoly of super-delegates. If a left-wing Democrat like Elizabeth Warren runs next time she will not face such an opponent. Sanders might well have beaten Trump. And while it would have caused a Democrat civil war, given the ‘entitled’ Clinton bandwagon, Obama probably missed a trick by discouraging Joe Biden from ...”

“... until after the mid-term elections, because ‘there’s nothing positive about the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders having more authority.’ Trump may be bad, but Democratic gains would be worse: Bolton seems determined to remain in the good graces of the Republican Party while condemning the sitting Republican president. He toes the party ...”

“... conviction. It was, after all, Escoffier who instructed his disciples, ‘Faites simple,’ and Elizabeth David who memorialised La Mère Poulard’s response to a Parisian restaurateur’s request for the secret of her famous omelettes at the Auberge de Saint-Michel Tête d’Or: ‘Voici la recette de l’omelette: je casse de bons œufs dans une ...”

“... deaths’ reappear in Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, again in connection with scepticism. When Elizabeth Bennet receives a letter from Darcy and realises that she has been ‘blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd’, this moment of self-knowledge also represents, Cavell says, her knowledge of being known, of being acknowledged, ‘as if until then her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... embattled, both having to extricate themselves from marriages (Lowell’s seismic separation from Elizabeth Hardwick, his wife of more than twenty years, is recounted in The Dolphin Letters). But it was his illness and Blackwood’s alcoholism that were responsible for the domestic chaos that marked their time together: him in and out of psychiatric ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”