“... 1987); the excellent multi-author collection Aids: The Burden of History, edited by Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox; Dennis Altman’s Aids and the New Puritanism. To the extent that Sontag’s essay links with those discussions and with the pleas you can read every week in liberal newspapers and journals – pleas against moralism and ...”

“... successful in the whole collection, deals with ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign the Anglican clergyman Samuel Harsnett, chaplain to the Bishop of London (and himself a future Archbishop of York), published an attack on Catholic exorcists in general and on the Jesuit William Weston in particular. It has been known since ...”

“... of the poem’s vocabulary. Public music is a wonderful subject (Rimbaud’s ‘A la Musique’, Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress’, Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March), public music as a backdrop to private musings better still. Eastbourne, (August) Bank Holiday – ‘the English ferragosto’, Montale ...”

“... the head of the Warwickshire branch, Edward Arden, was first implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth I, then tried and executed. As a result, official persecution of Catholics in the area was renewed. Hughes notes that Shakespeare’s father, John, was a recusant, and he also accepts as genuine a Spiritual Testament, found in 1784 and signed by John ...”

“... who appear in Read. I particularly missed some of the Northern women writers such as Charlotte Elizabeth, Amanda McKittrick Ros, Frances Browne and Anne Crone, whose varieties of Unionism and feminism would have been intriguingly disruptive of the meta-narrative. Northern writing is otherwise well-represented. Tom Paulin edits a section on ‘Northern ...”

“... further explanation of, say, quantitative verse. Personally I should have welcomed much more about Elizabeth Daryush, née Bridges, the poet’s elder daughter. Her poetry is not unknown; on the contrary Roy Fuller devoted an entire Oxford Lecture to it. But in this connection – she and her father worked together on metre – more could have been said ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... What must Dylan make of this meaningless buzz? Robert Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett that he had never lacked ‘a real set of good hearty praisers’: ‘No – what I laughed at in my “gentle audience” is a sad trick the real admirers have of admiring at the wrong place – enough to make an apostle swear. That does make ...”

“... 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 ...”