“... do some good work. What’s so tragic about that? It sounds more like ‘everything’ to me than Elizabeth Gilbert’s version: a year shlepping, shopping and praying around Italy, India and Indonesia. Despair is a dreadful thing to live with though people do. But as Gretchen rightly says, it’s of a different order to sniping at the cable ...”

“... afford to share their meal with him. There is nothing nice about the Brontës, as there is about Elizabeth Gaskell, for example. They have the voracious demand and implacable sense of entitlement of emotionally deprived children, which in some ways is what they were. Children can find ambivalence hard to handle, loving their parents but also raging against ...”

“... as wanton and luxurious, fluctuates over the years even more than the rage against images: while Elizabeth was zealous in ordering the replacement of icons by written tables of scripture (these calligraphic pictures oddly Islamic), she was musical, and did not root out singing. The Puritans later reprised the Reformers’ rage and while MacCulloch admits ...”

“... inspiration in rage about Culloden and the Salem witch trials (his mother traced her descent to Elizabeth How, hanged there in 1692): he now turned to the environment, and the mood grew darker – crushed Coca-Cola cans and dustbin lids for headdresses, clothes made from bin liners and plastic bags, models parading amid trash heaps. When the photographer ...”

“... on Carney’s struggle to join the elite of Harlem society – the world of his in-laws. Elizabeth, Carney’s wife, was raised on Striver’s Row with notches on the doorframes marking her growth; now she lives in a ‘dark apartment with a back window that peered out onto an air shaft and a front window kitty-corner to the elevated 1 ...”

“... slave traders preyed and prospered.Of the proponents of free produce, none shines brighter than Elizabeth Heyrick. The Quaker daughter of a Leicestershire clothier, Heyrick achieved some celebrity when her polemical Immediate, Not Gradual Emancipation (1824) sped through multiple editions on both sides of the Atlantic. For Heyrick, the cause of free produce ...”

“... Keys – but as he started to film 92 in the Shade he was into a freefall passion with the actress Elizabeth Ashley. As if a space had become free, one of the film’s stars, Warren Oates, had a fling with Becky, though she ended up marrying its other star, Peter Fonda. And then McGuane saw Margot Kidder. It’s like a libertarian Bonnie and Clyde – ‘we ...”

“... Amis finds room for another argument with himself about Israel, two passages (one reprinted) on Elizabeth Jane Howard, and a post-postscript describing a dream about her dog. Another difficulty is the range of Martin Amises on offer. Here he’s a distinguished, thoroughly normcore man of letters, there he’s a feral, muscle-flexing cult writer, and ...”

“... old man in a lace collar and black cap’, as they see him, a relic of ‘the England of Queen Elizabeth’. From Cambridge, Massachusetts, the regicides move on to New Haven but, fearing for their safety in the town, they set up camp a few miles away in a cave concealed by giant rocks. Whalley and Goffe hear ‘the forest settling down for the night, the ...”

“... the 1990s we would have called them cruise missiles; these days, we’d call them suicide drones. (Elizabeth Bowen did refer to them at the time as ‘droning things’.) It wasn’t just London. My mother, then a six-year-old child in Essex, remembers hearing their distinctive putt-putt overhead. She learned that when the engine cut out, the V-1 began its ...”

“... nearly contemporary Lighthouse at Two Lights by Edward Hopper. Hopper painted the light at Cape Elizabeth, Maine, by day in strong sun with his characteristic hard shadows. The lighthouse is unlit; the keeper’s gothic cottage beside it looks empty and the atmosphere is, if not sinister, then desolate and oppressive. Perhaps the greatest lighthouse image ...”

“... text had been abolished and (in the late 18th century) lost its status as a classic.’ Marie-Elizabeth Ducreux suggests that the Counter-Reformation’s imposition of Roman Catholicism on the Czech population failed to expunge a book-directed cultural bias. Her examination of the interrogations of those suspected of heresy – in which the possession of ...”

“... unknown tongue. Latin could get you an international reputation there, as achieved for instance by Elizabeth Jane Weston, ‘The Maid of England’, whose poetry – on her emotions, her life, on poverty and on the floods in Prague – won her a European reputation before and after she died at the age of 30, having borne seven children. In a list of major ...”

“... or ‘Babylonish dialect’ that each artist makes his own. On Dickens, on Joyce, on Elizabeth Bishop and John Betjeman – perhaps the best essays – he has things to say both brilliant and new. But he wouldn’t have said them, paradoxically, had he not been a critic capable of mistakes. In all his essays he brings virtues easy to class as ...”

“... the sacred encounters of his imagination that a poet’s impulse to write a poem arises.’ The Elizabeth Bishop who likened knowledge to water, ‘dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free’, would probably have agreed. So the introduction is an obvious disaster; the 55 poets, you feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets ...”