“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which he had never wanted to write, and mislaying the uncompleted manuscript of his life of Elizabeth Tudor. Throughout, his battle-cry was, as this book reminds us, that of Pius IX, Pro Ecclesia Contra Mundum. He had always liked to pop in on the Pope of the day; Beerbohm has a sketch of him giving the Pontiff the date of England’s forthcoming ...”

“... In June 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited Washington. Although the White House had had air-conditioning installed in its offices ten years earlier, family and guest rooms weren’t artificially cooled. Despite this, the King and Queen requested hot-water bottles, heavy-duty bedding and glasses of hot milk before bedtime ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... about as if it always meant the same thing. William of Orange was a constitutional monarch; so is Elizabeth II. The powers, rights, and obligations accruing to each are, of course, very different. Even written constitutions are subject to different interpretations at different times (as the extension of the franchise in the US to African Americans and women ...”

“... him with the right kind of dialogue on request. She was apparently not an infallible folklorist: Elizabeth Coxhead, editor of the modern edition of Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, notes that ‘some of the tales may have been bowdlerised for her ear, and the wicked landlord, who loomed large in peasant experience, is notably absent ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... suffered a shortage of torturers when they were needed, men who don’t even have the excuse of Elizabeth I or Calvin that to diminish the horror of the punishment was somehow to condone or even share in the offence. Sometimes ecclesiastical authorities, in milder mood, asked only for public penance, but up to about 1700 there was a preference for judicial ...”

“... then wife, Barbara, and an editor at Harper’s, Robert Silvers, plus Robert Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, Epstein launched the New York Review of Books. Like Anchor Books (and everything Epstein has invested himself in), the New York Review made a conscious attempt to raise the intellectual tone of American cultural life (to raise it, at ...”