“... claimed independence from Britain in 1966. The only public referral hospital, named after Queen Elizabeth, in the capital city, Maseru, was decrepit, poorly run and subject to explosive outbreaks of drug-resistant TB: few if any Basotho mourned plans for its closure and replacement. The question was who would build a new hospital and how it would be paid ...”

“... could he even appear under many guises, so that one might think of a particular person (Donne’s Elizabeth Drury, for example) as Christ? Although Empson has a lot of fun inventing a system of music appropriate to a ‘sexless’ species, and imagining the Wuzzoo attitude to babies (‘Do your women like having to look after these things? Of course they are ...”

“... him. Mathematically sharp, he yearned to be an economist. Among the activists in Nairobi was Sara Elizabeth Mooney, a 43-year-old Texan and literacy teacher, who offered Barack a job as her secretary. He cultivated an academic look, with horn-rimmed glasses and pipe. Mooney found him exceptionally promising: his ebullience, his self-confidence and his ...”

“... crashed through the boys’ club indifference and scepticism. McCarthy was there at the beginning. Elizabeth Hardwick, a Southerner who moved to New York in 1939, aspiring ‘to be a Jewish New York intellectual’, began writing for the magazine in 1945. The umbrageous Diana Trilling, wife of Lionel and often at war with the others, started writing book ...”

“... to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah (Cajah), Leonora Elizabeth (Betsey), Emma and baby John. Here, in the summer of 1820, William Hazlitt entered their lives, and here Sarah steps into the limelight of the Liber Amoris. That book remains the primary source for what happened between them – how could it be ...”

“... and with operations, performed by Fliess, on his turbinate bones. This point is not incidental: Elizabeth Thornton has plausibly suggested that Freud’s ‘hysterical’ symptoms may have been a consequence of the cocaine therapy that Fliess had initially prescribed for his migraines. Ignoring this possibility, Micale boils down Freud’s ‘hysteria’ to ...”

“... it was buried in the grounds of his Hampshire home – to mark the wedding of the young Princess Elizabeth. In this, he told future generations how the seeds of social destruction were being sown in his own time by the mass media and the spread of ‘the false, pernicious doctrine that “all men are equal”’, and urged his descendants to rebel against ...”

“... 4’s In Our Time that he was in effect speaking French in English; and at a recent conference Elizabeth Archibald suggested that he was writing macaronics – those poems that combine two or more languages within a single verse form – only in a single language. Most of us will be most familiar with macaronics through a carol such as ‘In Dulci ...”

“... no mistaking the real-life basis of the book, even if you don’t read the acknowledgments, where Elizabeth Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered and Solomon Volkov’s Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich are cited as sources. Barnes has done something of the kind before with The Porcupine, based on the trial of the Bulgarian communist leader ...”

“... forgets. A second never knows.’ Supposedly, we only learned how to eat well as a nation when Elizabeth David travelled to the Mediterranean and brought back news of olives, apricots and taramasalata. (Mediterranean Food was published in 1950.) But Meades recalls how his own mother’s cooking changed in the late 1950s, and not necessarily for the ...”

“... public discourse in general. As Cyndia Susan Clegg writes in her studies of press control under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts, censorship had always functioned via a range of regulations and mechanisms; it was a ‘crazy quilt’ of overlapping measures (proclamations, statutes, ordinances, prerogatives) emanating from, or enforced by, ‘a disarray of ...”

“... hypocritical’ making love, and perhaps worst of all the ‘obnoxious and joyless’ having sex (Elizabeth Bishop also despised that expression). ‘Your Name Which Isn’t Yours’ considers the effect of having a name capriciously bestowed on you at birth, something with which you can only fully reconcile yourself when you imagine it engraved on a ...”

“... In England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the ...”

“... and the Glory that it showed ‘the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth’. That must raise a few Protestant eyebrows, for it tacitly implies that the achievements of Bloody Mary, who burned far more Protestant heretics than her unwilling sister executed Jesuit priests, were not really a persecution at all. Another ...”

“... 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 ...”