“... he was quietly retired soon afterwards. I once discussed Allenby’s Egyptian career with the late Elizabeth Monroe, a keen-spirited exponent of the liberal imperialist ‘Chatham House version’ of modern Middle Eastern history. I had professed myself shocked by the crass brutality of Allenby’s response to the Stack assassination. Miss Monroe urged a more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Oxford. His Lemprière ancestors included a lieutenant bailiff of Jersey during the reign of Elizabeth, and a governor of the island under Oliver Cromwell. John was a teenage prodigy who entered Pembroke in 1785 and completed his dictionary at the age of 23, during a year spent as assistant master at Reading School under another Jersey man, Richard ...”

“... celebrated with a holiday in Ireland, the highlight of which was a happy fortnight as guests of Elizabeth Bowen at Bowen’s Court. Returning to England in July, they briefly rented a house in Charleston, but soon moved to another rented house, Lovells Farm, in Marnhull, Dorset – Hardy’s Marlot – where Ramsbotham worked on a novel while Reed reviewed ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of novels) is historical in much the same way that Gone with the Wind and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex are historical. It takes a familiar time, draws a horizontal line along an axis, and marks it out with peak events everyone has heard of, weighting them with their most commonplace interpretations. This is then used as a moving backdrop in ...”