“... to racier works like Simon Forman’s Autobiography or the lives of unknowns like Mary Pennington, Elizabeth Stirredge or Captain Roger Clap. Literary evidence is almost totally absent. The Shepherd in The Winter’s Tale says: ‘I would there were no age between ten and three-and twenty ... for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with ...”

“... the present day.’ Or again, ‘a same-sex coterie may well have flourished at the court of Queen Elizabeth, around the Earl of Southampton, and may have involved a same-sex identity recognisably continuous with that experienced by some men today.’ The queer who emerges at the end of the 19th century may be a new composite but he quickly takes his place ...”

“... and left a million pounds to his heir, who became the first Lord Melbourne and married Elizabeth Milbanke, Byron’s friend and confidante. Dr Johnson’s opinion that the main motive for making money was to found a landed family was widely if not universally shared, and with it went the view that it was necessary for peers and baronets to possess ...”

“... the comedy (unintentional? it’s hard to say) of juxtapositions like this: To the St John & Elizabeth [hospital]... Mr Mulvany visited me at 7.45. We had a long talk about the problem of materialism in a modern society. He said he would inject the piles tomorrow and look at the inside of the rectum etc. The diaries, then, show Williams to be emblematic ...”

“... giving way to feeling seems to Davie un-British and unmanly. It is in some sense feminine. ‘Elizabeth Rowe ... was a byword in her time for emotionalism that Watts indeed apologised for.’ ‘Indeed’? This is a startling statement. One expects the misogyny, but not the twisting of the evidence. Many of Rowe’s poems are very serene; some describe ...”

“... about himself he is. A really good novelist performing this act is always a joy to watch. Elizabeth Bowen did it brilliantly, though much more ruthlessly than Amis ever did, in the character of Anna in The Death of the Heart. But that special sort of act is absent from You Can’t Do Both – an apposite title because up to now Amis always has. I ...”

“... such friends and rivals and enemies at Vassar have become dimmer than the shades. One of them was Elizabeth Bishop the poet, always known as plain ‘Bishop’, who lived next to the John on her corridor in the college, and wrote a little poem beginning: ‘Ladies and gents, ladies and gents, flushing away your excrements ...’ She later got it into her head ...”

“... sectarian warfare. History exemplified the moral. Henry VIII dismantled the ancient religion and Elizabeth I prudently reached a via media which avoided the ferocious religious wars of France and Scotland. James I foolishly drew religion back into statecraft and Charles I so intensified the problem that a civil war of religion and a breakdown in political ...”

“... entailed a continuous viewpoint, which happened to be that of a woman. Then there’s the case of Elizabeth Bowen, whose flair for social comedy and its concomitant, oblique social criticism, the author of The Female Form seems to disregard. Bowen, whose characteristic tone is amiably sardonic, is more or less lumped together with the ...”

“... his preferred Neo-Romantic illustrators, Keith Vaughan and John Minton excelled. Minton decorated Elizabeth David’s first book, A Book of Mediterranean Food with tipsy Breton sailors, market girls, lobster pots, fruits de mer, as a kind of delicious ballet in and out of the dedicated text. As Wright says, when you take up a book published by Lehmann you get ...”

“... of one sort or another. This book omits to tell us of the sugar spectacular at Elvetham when Queen Elizabeth visited the Earl of Hertford. The Earl’s source of supplies can only be guessed at, but his confectioners were able to lay on reproductions in sugar of all Her Majesty’s castles and principal assets, and then, having a good deal of sugar left ...”

“... Who do you think will close the door after you? Pushkin?’ The question, which Elaine Feinstein quotes in her introduction to this excellent biography, is one which apparently might still be asked by a Russian mother of a careless child. No British mother would say anything like it, if only because she could not think of a figure with comparable evocative power: writers here are hardly household names ...”

“... printed the English Life Table No 3, of 1864. And that was that. Robert Browning remarked to Elizabeth Barrett that certain revisions Tennyson had made to his poems in deference to the critics were ‘much as if Babbage were to take my opinion – undo his calculating machine by it’. Browning spoke truer than he knew, for Babbage had actually written ...”

“... pictures of her family mingling with cuttings of famous actors and ‘fashions chosen by Princess Elizabeth’, will seem extraordinarily accurately captured to anyone who has visited the house in Amsterdam, but also have a deep imaginative rightness which is again achieved in the strongest parts of Independence. But in the latter, such things are sometimes ...”

“... age of 12 he was a Page of Honour to George V and in the late 1940s Private Secretary to Princess Elizabeth. From Harrow, and Trinity College, Cambridge, he entered the diplomatic service the year before Munich, and thoroughly approved Chamberlain’s course of action. A straightforward Anglican and Conservative, loyal to his family and background, Colville ...”