“... of 20th-century lesbian libertinism: witness the tantalising vignettes we have of the young Elizabeth Bishop on Key West, for example, in bed with Billie Holiday; or Natalie Barney, who took her last lover at the age of 80; or Vita Sackville-West, one of whose lovers cherished the marks on her inner thighs left by Vita’s earrings. Carstairs would ...”

“... those letters are published Hughes should be established with Keats, Hopkins, the early Yeats and Elizabeth Bishop as one of the most important letter-writing poets. The Selected Letters is sensitively and meticulously edited by Christopher Reid (the one mistake I noted is the attribution of Antigone to Euripides), and in his introduction he says that an ...”

“... ease of posture and conversational initiative, Mr Kennedy might just as well have been a bishop testing a candidate for ordination.’ Clearly here is a man with all the confidence and aplomb in the world. As the recent chairman of Did you see? he smoothly concealed any distaste he may have felt for the more freakish performers on his viewing ...”

“... Preaching​ before Edward VI and his council in June 1548, Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, reflected that ‘in my time hath come many alterations.’ Gardiner was referring to the break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries and the iconoclastic fervour of Edward’s reign, each of which represented a ‘great alteration’ of policy and sentiment ...”

“... and doom caused by a sterile war, economic distress and mounting fears for the future, were over. Elizabeth, the ruler who had hung on to life for too long, was dead. The reaction which she had feared, she herself having experienced it in 1558 as heir to a dying monarch, happened. Relief, rather than mourning, greeted Gloriana’s passing; and all eyes turned ...”

“... on the coffins of people they have never known. This conflict of priorities is not a new one. Bishop Coverdale complained about weddings in 1552: there was too much dressing up, showing off, music, dancing, drinking, flirting, bawdy singing and raucous jollification; not enough sober religion. An Admonition to the Parliament, published twenty years ...”

“... nation. The rocklike reflectiveness of Ursula Le Guin and the ‘deep subjectivity’ of Elizabeth Bishop are evoked with a real warmth. When Bloom considers a poem at length, as he does Marianne Moore’s extraordinary poem ‘Marriage’, he often takes you places you never thought you might go. But these chapters can display the anxiety of ...”

“... times since it first appeared in the war a number of people have been riveted in this way by Elizabeth Smart’s one-off nouvelle. When the manuscript was accepted in 1941 she had wanted to call it Images of Mica, but George Barker, whom it was all about, flipped the typed pages at random and found a sentence beginning: ‘By Grand Central Station I sat ...”

“... Dinteville, the French ambassador in England, and his friend and fellow humanist Georges de Selve, bishop of Lavaur, who passed through London in the spring of 1533, around the time of Anne Boleyn’s coronation. Selve was later appointed French ambassador in Venice – hence the title by which the painting has come to be known.Dinteville and Selve are ...”

“... good thing just now if English school-children, at least, were to get to know more about Queen Elizabeth and less about Adolf Hitler than they have been doing recently? Here, anyway, is the New Oxford’s contribution about Elizabeth, entrusted to a Welshman from its home university, Penry Williams, where the old one was ...”

“... crashed through the boys’ club indifference and scepticism. McCarthy was there at the beginning. Elizabeth Hardwick, a Southerner who moved to New York in 1939, aspiring ‘to be a Jewish New York intellectual’, began writing for the magazine in 1945. The umbrageous Diana Trilling, wife of Lionel and often at war with the others, started writing book ...”

“... a woman, a writer, and a person with the right progressive ideas. So could the author of the poem, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It is only fair to say, though, that this kind of wish-fulfilment is not only an accurate portrayal of the kind of selves that Charlotte and Elizabeth became, and wished to become: it is also a ...”

“... requires of a monarch. It was not always so. Whatever else has been said about the first Elizabeth (one recalls Sheridan’s ‘no scandal about Queen Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull. In sending her royal brother Edward VI her youthful likeness, soon to be hidden for ever behind ...”

“... in DIY self-pickling. Compared with Highsmith in her seventies, her fellow drunk-dyke genius Elizabeth Bishop looked like a fresh-blooming flower in her later years – a regular Goop-enhanced Gwyneth.Then there was the compulsive sexual promiscuity – a festival of glut, recrimination and endlessly renewed licentious squalor (I almost wrote ...”

“... and many service officers down to 26 majors and 71 captains, and also ecclesiastics: one arch-bishop, six bishops and 11 other clerics.’ One does not readily think of princes and dukes as book-borrowers and Ruskin’s words spring to mind: ‘We call ourselves a rich nation, and we are filthy and foolish enough to thumb each other’s books out of ...”