“... of motives for Ralegh’s Orinoco plan, from mysticism to the desire for fast bucks; from winning Elizabeth back by driving a wedge into Spanish territory, to adventurism and intellectual curiosity. Ralegh had been intrigued years earlier by a theory he had first encountered in conversations with a Spanish Inca scholar captured by his privateers, that El ...”

“... and at sea. They were also partners in crime. Myers quotes from an Old Bailey trial in which Elizabeth Mandeville, who was black, was prosecuted for working ‘as one of a pair with Ann Grace (a white woman) to steal three half guineas and six shillings from John Pidduck. Grace extracted the money while Mandeville pinned the victims down.’ She also ...”

“... are a thing of the past. ‘You cannot seduce anyone when innocence is not a value,’ Elizabeth Hardwick said in ‘Seduction and Betrayal’, with the clear implication that it is not a value now. In fact, the only innocence about which we still obviously care is the innocence of children: and there is no doubt that, unlike adults, children may ...”

“... on top of the daughter he had fathered before he married, he had himself had two children by Lady Elizabeth Foster (Bess); according to the double standards of the day that, however, was fully acceptable, and the Duke’s bastards by Bess were brought up alongside his legitimate children. Rather more unusually, Bess, too, lived in Devonshire House with the ...”

“... the name of the girl, an interesting predecessor of Saints Bernadette and Thérèse of Lisieux, or Elizabeth Radclyfe, Yeats’s psychic medium, and many more young females who have altered their status and their influence thanks to their persuasive skills in clairvoyance. A vision and a haunting are different, however, because medieval ghosts were ...”

“... sister was found to exist, but cannot be traced. Her name, he now knows, was originally Linda Elizabeth Chester; she was born in 1950 in Southport and legally given away. Family Secrets is another attempt to awaken what Leitch calls ‘visceral family connection ... blood calling blood’. He opens his tale with clumsily Chandleresque atmospherics, tricks ...”

“... not the first to see Frege’s suitability for this role: twenty years ago, in Three Philosophers, Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach treated Frege alongside Aristotle and St Thomas, two philosophers whose usefulness has often been their magisterial quality and the ways it can be appropriated. There are good reasons for assigning this kind of role to Frege. He ...”

“... big family, and the Diary is often at its most comically eloquent when dealing with Nancy, Ben, Elizabeth, Will, Lizzy, Jack and their successors. Though the master-servant relationship is quite unequivocal, there is not a hint of that reciprocal class-consciousness which was to preoccupy the Victorians. To Woodforde and Nancy the servants are ‘our ...”

“... with Charlotte’s experiences is the longest and most satisfactory in the book. Period detail – Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Palladian, blue and white striped dresses, ‘pancake’ make-up – is more abundant here than elsewhere. The point about one woman in her time playing many parts – university wife in an English provincial town, South African ...”

“... nice touch, if a bit obvious – from Rochester, ‘the home of Kodak’: He introduced his wife, Elizabeth, and said: ‘This young man here is an old Japan hand.’    ‘Oh, wonderful. We can pick your brains for ideas. Would you recommend the Temple of the Golden Pavilion?’       ‘I’m afraid I’ve never been ...”

“... or two after the start of the Second World War, remains the most memorable. It had a foreword by Elizabeth Bowen, rather surprisingly, and was certainly very similar in its atmosphere and method to the French novels which were to become the fashion after the war, although it was also unmistakably Anglo-Saxon, the French ghost impalpable and, at that early ...”

“... backed up by penalties; respectability by inviting royal protectors to become figureheads. (Queen Elizabeth II is the present Grand Patroness.) The year 1717 marked the foundation of the British Grand Lodge, out of four merged London lodges, and in the course of the century the rituals took permanent shape around the legend of King Solomon’s Temple, while ...”

“... general reading public. So much for Europe, and for the few American writers – Lowell, Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop – who share European values. But American literature, on the whole, is – to a degree Bayley thinks perverse – internalised; it lives by starving itself, cultivates impoverishment, blankness and homelessness. It doesn’t tell stories: ‘we ...”

“... that ‘the graph of female progress, far from ascending in a straight line from the death of Elizabeth to the accession of Queen Anne, rose during the middle decades’ of the century, only ‘to dip again with the restoration of the old order in 1660’. From that ‘cyclical pattern’ Fraser draws a contemporary lesson. Were vigilance now to ...”

“... the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, talks about the hot weather and the visit to Paris of Princess Elizabeth, and goes into some detail about two women. One is Dolorès, about whom he had previously written that she loved him ‘à faire peur’. He describes their affair as ‘stationnaire’, and explains his violent reaction when she writes to tell him that ...”