“... I take up my pen once more after this long interval to converse with my in many ways twin bro.’ Thus William James to Henry in 1873. We might put against this comments from earlier letters. ‘Our ways are so far apart that I doubt if we ever really get intimate’ (1867). But then again, a year later: ‘I feel as if you were one of the 2 or 3 sole intellectual & moral companions I have ...”

“... Rossetti among others, but proves pretty much beside the point in the few pages devoted to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The last thing most readers will wish, however, is that Victorian Poetry were longer. As it is, the book’s peculiar combination of allusiveness and syntactic uncertainty renders considerable stretches of the argument nearly ...”

“... from Robert Browning; LaMotte is compounded from (but again, not reducible to) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson. (Byatt lectured on all these writers in the days when she taught in the English Department of ‘Prince Albert College’ where Roland is a postgraduate – a place instantly recognisable to ...”

“... sentence after sentence’. Her criticisms of prominent women writers such as Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen and Woolf appear to be coloured by jealousy, while her praise of lesser-known women writers, such as Ruth Suckow and E.B.C. Jones, seems extravagant. It is something of a shock to discover that the prototype of the pessimistic and deprecatory ...”

“... at a sitting. We drank crème de menthe and water between whiles. ‘You’ is Guinness’s wife Elizabeth at their home near Andover. This book is an editing of his letters to her in four years of separation, plus a few letters to his father, and some entries in the diaries he was keeping. Guinness had travelled out by ship from Greenock and (didn’t most ...”

“... belong more to the comic underplots of 19th-century English fiction than to a New Zealand reality. Elizabeth Bowen, commenting on the New Zealand stories of the kind Mansfield suppressed, says: ‘their flavour and vigour raise a question – could she have made a regional writer? Did she, by leaving her own country, deprive herself of a range of ...”

“... every night, snorted coke with Mick, Marianne and Brian Jones, made frocks for Faye Dunaway, Elizabeth Taylor, Sharon Tate, Brigitte Bardot and Liza Minnelli, slept with Celia Birtwell, David Hockney, Patrick Prockter, Wayne Sleep and assorted tall, thin models: was he the one who had a life? But the later fallen, paranoid speed-freak Ossie, who fished ...”

“... Hughes, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.M. Synge, David Jones, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number of Davie’s poems. If we were to read the adjective ‘British’ in the subtitle of the book as an indication of defensive ...”

“... thing her children might be able to turn into money ... when times were hard’. Those children, Elizabeth (Princess Antoine Bibesco) and Anthony (‘Puffin’), both died without cashing in on this legacy. The diary, accompanied by an undisclosed quantity of private correspondence, thereupon passed into other family hands. Mark Bonham Carter, who holds the ...”

“... as their own sovereignty, the overlordship of the peoples of the Upper Nile, but also – and here Elizabeth Monroe was almost certainly right in her excellent little book on Britain’s Moment in the Middle East – because Egypt was sick and tired of compulsory partnerships, which as in this case would bring British troops back whenever there was any trouble ...”

“... cartoonists often call him) burst out of exile and raised an army. She reports, via Princess Elizabeth, to the British royal family, using, lest the letters be intercepted, a code that would have delighted Murasaki since it consists of calling the personages of the royal family by such names as Magnolia and Honey Suckle. She notes that in France it is ...”

“... functioned not as a name but as a signal. I have some qualms about the contention that ‘I am Elizabeth Anscombe’ is not an identity statement, since in the right context the statement would be a revelation of her identity. However, the disclaimer could perhaps be justified as a precaution against those misguided philosophers who think that statements ...”

“... churchwardens ran the parishes, became increasingly concerned with such matters in the reign of Elizabeth and the first two Stuarts; utopian writers from More to Gott shared the same concern. In More’s Utopia intensive and disciplined use of the labour resources of the whole country results in the prevention of scarcity. A century later ‘Burton was ...”

“... the Calvinist international was often a matter of words or gestures, which cost rulers nothing. Elizabeth I, in spite of ‘la mauvaise opinion’ which she held of Geneva after John Knox had written his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women there, found it convenient to mouth pious concern for her distressed co-religionists ...”

“... at least one stroke of luck: he has become, he tells his friend, ‘the confirmed acquaintance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her husband’. It is, in fact, the lesser luminary, Robert Browning, who catches Booth’s interest from the outset, and in a strange way: for on the very evening when Booth is introduced to the poet, news comes of a horrible ...”