“... Strong immediately broke with the poster for his first major exhibition, The Winter Queen, about Elizabeth of Bohemia. That was in 1963, his ‘annus mirabilis’, and the next year saw another breakthrough when David Piper became director of the Portrait Gallery and allowed Strong free rein. He now had ‘a super job’, as he confided to a friend: ‘new ...”

“... of the translations are by Weinberger himself, but there are also versions of individual poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Tomlinson. In the notes Weinberger has glossed allusions, and brought together, as my quotations have suggested, an illuminating set of comments by Paz himself. Paz’s recurring ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have ‘been chopped up’. The oddness and severe limits of this artistic education, which Elizabeth Prettejohn emphasises in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of Burne-Jones’s work at Tate Britain (until 24 February), is even more striking when you consider that Rossetti, despite having spent several years first at Sass’s Drawing School ...”

“... of famous names – encounters with Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Assia Wevill, George Barker and Elizabeth Smart are described, sometimes with an almost embarrassing degree of openness – it takes an effort of will to remember that what is described actually happened. This odd effect makes more sense if you see it as an attempt on Weldon’s part to ...”

“... This tradition was established by Emily Dickinson and her followers: H.D., Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Bishop. It is a tradition predominantly, though not exclusively, of women poets; the opposing tradition of ornate or discursive amplitude has been predominantly male (Whitman, Crane, Pound, Eliot, Ginsberg). Wariness and rigour characterise this genus ...”

“... in temperature in the box. The Accumulator that Reich gave Neill arrived in England on the Queen Elizabeth in April 1947, along with a smaller ‘shooter’ for healing wounds: ‘I use the box daily and read your books in it,’ Neill wrote appreciatively. Neill soon became convinced of the machine’s effectiveness: ‘We used the small Accu on a girl of ...”

“... cancer. Some of this material was close in spirit to the descriptions of the illness and death of Elizabeth Reegan in The Barracks, and much of it was composed from life. In Memoir it is rewritten word by painful word, so that whole paragraphs from The Leavetaking resurface in fractionally altered forms. This rewriting is in some respects an unsurprising ...”

“... as the refuge of ‘many a psychological misfit and lonely crank’ – despite the fact that Elizabeth II and Winston Churchill were both inducted as druids.Stone Circles takes a balanced approach, appreciating Stukeley’s contribution to the scientific as well as the mythic. Having trained as a doctor, he transferred his skills from anatomy to field ...”

“... have been advanced in the name of a maternalist feminism or eugenic motherhood, as the historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae showed in Mothers of Massive Resistance (2018). Yet Garbes seems convinced that mothering’s progressive character is assured. Organised political activity and redistributive policies aren’t required. ‘As much as some of us might ...”

“... tightrope-walker and trickster, but for a time he serves at the court of the ‘winter queen’, Elizabeth (wife of Friedrich and daughter of James VI of Scotland), who’s a theatre enthusiast and consoles Shakespeare on the death of his son Hamlet. (‘Hamnet,’ he corrects her.) Shakespeare turns up again in The Director when Pabst is first pushed to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”