“... tragedy. Ibsen’s great female roles helped a new generation of actors to emerge, including Elizabeth Robins in England, Eleanora Duse in Italy and Eva Le Gallienne in the United States. Even the ageing superstar Sarah Bernhardt appeared in Lady from the Sea in 1906. Meanwhile another set of directors and actors turned to Ibsen for quite different ...”

“... with many opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since ...”

“... about nature but refuses to call them ‘nature poems’. Her work is ‘full of hymns’, as Elizabeth Bishop said of her own, as well as pagan shouts and birdcalls. Oswald paints wild, stormy miniatures through which large figures lurch, blindfolded and burdened: A mouldering man, a powdered and reconstituted one, walking the same so on and so ...”

“... Historically, he has appealed much more strongly to poets than to scholars or critics: Southey, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves and Auden were all enthusiasts. It was Southey’s endorsement that inspired Alexander Dyce to produced the first scholarly edition in 1843, and that remained the only source for academic study until John ...”

“... and betrayal in a ruined Camelot, completed as the King was forced to flee into exile in 1470. Elizabeth Woodville, Edward’s ambitious wife, had, it seemed, been his Guinevere: ‘Her beauty and falsehood caused such discord that caused all Arthur’s Court and his princes to be slain.’ Edward’s exile proved brief but, following his decisive return ...”

“... is literal. The poem is unlikely, for instance, to be directed to ‘my sovereign’, Queen Elizabeth I, or to a contemporary slave-runner, though the words say ‘Being your slave’. The Sonnets launch us far and fast into the kingdom of metaphor, where life is real but not a statistic. To give one instance: the lines express the kind of detached ...”

“... which took shape rapidly and was published in 1970, winning praise from William Trevor and Elizabeth Bowen. ‘If I had bothered to look at [my] diary,’ he noted two months after its publication, ‘I wd also have used the “flight of stone steps leading up into thin air”, which I simply forgot.’ He had added a detail to his version of the ...”

“... Nast out to become Vogue’s biggest shareholder, but New York retained editorial control, and Elizabeth Penrose, Nast’s protégée (and likely mistress) was sent to clear away the clichés. Brogue, she discovered, was ‘excessively sprightly’ and in need of American rigour. She didn’t like having to pay Evelyn Waugh 20 guineas an article either ...”

“... to Ireland they had to buy their big house. There was no Bowen’s Court to write a history of, as Elizabeth Bowen did. They made up for this shortcoming with an unquestioned loyalty to the empire and a cult of the stiff upper lip. The two were inextricably entwined, as Keane acknowledged in an interview when Good Behaviour came out:Mother’s father governed ...”

“... King’s has a tradition of involvement with the Secret Service: Sir Francis Walsingham ran it for Elizabeth I.) Today the hounds are in pursuit of Andrew Gow, the Classical scholar and art collector who was Blunt’s mentor at Trinity. Gow, who had taught at Eton, devoted part of his life to editing Nicander, a didactic Greek poet who wrote poems on ...”

“... Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he have nominated? Orwell, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett? Or conceivably ... himself? Waugh has even proved exportable to America: Brideshead Revisited was the most popular series ever shown on American public-service television. Still, his former admirer Edmund Wilson was revolted ...”

“... physicians and scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries – prominent among them Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, John Banister, as well as Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby and Robert Boyle. Mummy continued to be dispensed well into the 18th century, when Robert James’s Pharmacopeia Universalis (1747) advised: Mummy resolves coagulated Blood, and is ...”

“... year later, which cost the lives of around ten thousand men for nothing, but which a furious Queen Elizabeth ensured was hushed up.What is incontestable is that over the years the British navy really did achieve the mastery of the seas of which it had so long boasted. With new financial resilience, it began to grasp the techniques that made it possible to keep ...”

“... that they would in due course graduate and enter the medical profession, into which so far only Elizabeth Blackwell (who had qualified in America) and Elizabeth Garrett (who had slipped in through a loophole) had made their way, led to furious academic resistance. The University reneged on its own regulations, and when ...”

“... something which was deplored even at the time of the centenary of publication 38 years ago, when Elizabeth David pointed out that the currently available Mrs Beeton didn’t contain a single recipe from the original. That this is an odd state of affairs does not of itself make a facsimile of the 1861 book an interesting object. People buy and use the modern ...”