“... he took up with her too, although she came to infuriate him. Then there was a year or so with Elizabeth von Arnim, and a woman who tried to kill herself in front of him, and a few (not many) prostitutes. And there was also of course Rebecca West, whom he called his ‘panther’, and by whom he had a son (whose middle name was Panther) in 1914. West was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The Accidental City joins several popular and better-written histories of New Orleans – Grace Elizabeth King’s A History of Louisiana, Herbert Asbury’s The French Quarter, and The New Orleans City Guide and Gumbo Ya-Ya (both compiled by the Federal Writers’ Project). The next chapter may belong to geographers. As Powell points out, New Orleans is ...”

“... Women (1984) – about how all women are bitches – was coloured by his rancorous divorce from Elizabeth Jane Howard. Bradford’s Exhibit A, however, is ‘Letter to a Friend about Girls’ (‘After comparing lives with you for years,/I see how I’ve been losing’), which Larkin tinkered with endlessly but chose not to publish because, he said, ‘the ...”

“... for Mary Tudor’s revived Catholic Church in England, but instantly abandoned by the Protestant Elizabeth I, and not taken up by Protestants until the 19th century. Granted, there was much more to the innovations in Counter-Reformation Catholicism than Trent ever got round to discussing: you would not know from its decrees, for instance, that it was in this ...”

“... Saxton and his patrons, collaborators and surveyors, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was to Elizabeth I what Cromwell was to Henry VIII, could see England as a whole, and as a collection of coloured counties, together with lines of communication and the seats of its more notable inhabitants. This resource was not available to Cromwell, which is a little ...”

“... deciding which side they were on. Which is why it is such a delight to make the acquaintance of Elizabeth Banks, the ‘American girl’ journalist who took London by storm in 1893 by donning various disguises and then publishing her experiences in the popular press. A number of Banks’s masquerades crossed class lines: she became a flower-girl and a ...”

“... Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire, which includes some pieces written by Shelley’s sister Elizabeth, is a collection of amateurish lyrics, or ‘songs’, and Gothic fragments, as well as one wholesale plagiarism from Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis. The presence of the plagiarised poem, probably added to fill out the volume, makes Shelley’s yearning to ...”

“... story and another. Pride and Prejudice has three turning-points, Moretti reckons. In Chapter 3, Elizabeth Bennet meets Darcy, and takes a dislike to him; in Chapter 34, he proposes to her; in Chapter 58, she accepts him. By Moretti’s count, Austen has supplemented these memorable scenes with about 110 episodes in which a fair amount happens, but nothing ...”

“... by women, from Regina Maria Roche and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) to Jane Elgee (Lady Wilde) and Elizabeth Bowen. If they were solidly reputable bourgeois, Irish Protestants also preserved a secret pact with the vagrant, the deviant, the unspeakable terror lurking in the attic. Exuberant, gregarious and loquacious, they could also be ...”

“... the most powerful of the novel’s many miniature and apparently minor females, the future Queen Elizabeth I: ‘Ginger bristles poke from beneath her cap, and her eyes are vigilant; he has never seen an infant in the crib look so ready to take offence.’ That description occurs in one of the many exceptionally vivid scenes set in interior spaces dominated ...”

“... 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 ...”