“... 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 ...”

“... to locate her characters in the richest and most heady of atmospheres. There’s an essay by Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Out of a Book’, in which she divides child readers into two sets: sensationalists and future students. Among the first lot are those who, in later life, will gravitate towards disreputable novels – children’s stories with sex added, an ...”

“... von Meysenburg became a pioneer of women’s education, joining forces with Barbara Leigh Smith, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Emily Davies. Two thousand lost or disorientated souls are not many in a country of twenty millions. Yet they were remarkable for their variety and individuality, and, not least, for their personal and ideological ...”

“... to make his own, and original, despite the difficulty of its obviously novelish usefulness. Elizabeth Bowen did the same, believing with a certain inner passion, or so her novels indicate, that we remain secretly arrested by early and terminative emotional experiences, smoking away for the rest of our lives and perhaps relit at intervals. The Old Devils ...”

“... reader has other compensations. A specially interesting man, Charles Ritchie, the great friend of Elizabeth Bowen, found in his diary the compensation for his complete failure to be ‘a writer’. Young diarists usually show off. Evelyn Waugh records in 1956 that in the hope of understanding his son Auberon better ‘I read the diaries I kept at his age. I ...”

“... famous trio of this time, William Cavendish, fifth Duke of Devonshire, his wife Georgiana and Lady Elizabeth Foster, concealed their goings-on and their miscellaneous progeny in the grand seclusion of Chatsworth and Devonshire House. Less socially-exalted, the Hamiltons and Nelson were at once more notorious and far more vulnerable. All three were outsiders of ...”

“... attack on this whole critical trend – ‘re-enacting the hubris of the Romantics’ – by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese). It may well indeed be high time that classical scholarship, too, thought harder about the kinds of voice it chooses to hear (or to speak with). When Braund, for example, chooses to admit that she would rather read A.S. Byatt than the ...”

“... her freedom, and even so, the old mood is still going strong in Pride and Prejudice, where Elizabeth Bennet’s favourable judgment of Mr Darcy is prepared by a walk round the moral nuances of his estate, and by her approving gaze at a portrait which catches a hidden aspect of the man. Peacock, the finest and steadiest of ...”

“... to his friendships, he found unexpected happiness in middle life with the last of his mistresses, Elizabeth Armistead, whom he eventually married. By these means, Mitchell seems to say, Fox, always a reluctant politician, came to see that personal relationships and the life of the mind were more important than the struggles of public life and organised his ...”

“... people, which his captain then ordered him to do; but on being told by the master of the Sarah and Elizabeth that the ship was full of oil and would blow up, he desisted.’ Instead Essington ordered his marines to fire down the hatches, killing one man and wounding three. Most of the crew were then put aboard Aurora, in irons. Essington, escaping ...”

“... each testified that he could manage on £1000 a year net. V.S. Pritchett needed a bit more. Elizabeth Bowen raised a few eyebrows at the time by confessing that ‘I would like to have £3500 a year net’ and Cyril Connolly, who organised Horizon’s survey, opted for ‘five pounds a day’ – £100 a day today: ‘If he is to enjoy leisure and ...”

“... of past existence set our imaginations running – the quick in the pursuit of the dead, to borrow Elizabeth Hardwick’s description of biography.In their introduction to Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love 1850s-1950s (Five Continents, £52), Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell note that their collection came about accidentally, when twenty years ago they ...”

“... placed in mid-Victorian Kensington. Their friends included the ageing Radical John Bright and Elizabeth Gaskell’s widower, William. But smart society was closed to them and this was something that Beatrix’s mother, Helen, seems to have minded deeply. A grim-faced little woman, she apparently occupied herself entirely with a round of calls and with ...”

“... prose is alive with doubts, speculations, lapses in memory. It is a breathing, flawed thing. In Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928), Lytton Strachey collapsed this passage into an unforgettable final vignette of Francis Bacon: ‘an old man, disgraced, shattered, alone, on Highgate Hill, stuffing a dead fowl with snow’. Strachey, serenely ...”

“... recording ‘his own martyrdom’. In this regard, ‘Ash, Needle, Pencil and Match’ resembles Elizabeth Bishop’s bittersweet prose-poem ‘12 O’Clock News’, another uncanny tribute to the writer’s crutches: inkwells, erasers, cigarettes. From such portraits of nothingness Walser developed a worldview. ‘Modestly stepping aside can never be ...”