“... in 1989, found that even in London, it was a minority sect, at least until the early years of Elizabeth. Christopher Haigh, who describes himself as an ex-Methodist Anglican agnostic, decided that this revisionist band needed a leader, and headed into battle with a stream of publications that came to full fruition in English ...”

“... though the subject doesn’t always afford full rein to his talents. While the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Professor of British History, whose work until now has been exclusively on British topics, has ably negotiated the crossing of the Atlantic, one might have preferred him to make another subject his entry-point into US history. Still, it ...”

“... and that ‘half the miseries of life’ derive from ‘a tyrannical domineering temper’. Elizabeth Wollstonecraft was shackled to a mercurial, violent husband who bullied his family and drank away his modest fortune; silently enduring his rage, she showed neither affection nor gratitude to the daughter who tried in vain to protect her. Mary developed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... well-informed speculation. It’s maddening that we don’t know whether Manteo and Wanchese met Elizabeth I. The German travel writer Lupold von Wedel said they did – but that’s all we have, along with the thought that Raleigh probably did orchestrate a meeting because he was such a show-off. After five pages about Essomericq, a Brazilian child enslaved ...”

“... not all children ‘got on well’ in the world. Among the cases Soares has uncovered are those of Elizabeth R., who was dismissed and sent back to her mother after she wore her mistress’s clothes, and Ellen G., who was sent back to the society for ‘sulkiness’.Waifs were considered ‘worse than orphans’, as Barnardo put it; orphans at least had no ...”

“... Iowa Writers’ Workshop (‘biggest drug drop between Chicago and Denver’) and was taught by Elizabeth Hardwick, who called her first attempt at a novel ‘the most disgusting book I’ve ever read’. Lynn is right that she will never ‘marry a handsome young man and live in Scarsdale’; instead, DeLynn entered, in hesitant stages, into lesbian life ...”

“... So this is the best of Jarrell the poet. If we look at it beside the best of Lowell, Berryman or Elizabeth Bishop, though, the sensibility at work seems of a lesser order. About some poems there is an air of contrivance, and the deeply-felt pieces about childhood are both affecting and sentimental. Pictures is a strange, sometimes strained, minor ...”

“... his deepest feelings – for his rather alarming mother, for his American substitute mother Elizabeth Mayer, for his lover Pears – find gauche or commonplace expression. And a great many letters are, not surprisingly but also not thrillingly, about musical business, engagements, fees, commissions, permissions. Along the way, they do provide incidental ...”

“... May the 24th is Bob Dylan’s 50th birthday. To anyone involved with Dylan in the mid-Sixties, say during his medicine-fuelled blaze with the Band through Australia and Europe in 1966, the fact that he is not only alive but still performing twenty-five years later must in itself seem utterly extraordinary. One of the key aspects of the Dylan myth during those roller-coaster years was that he wouldn’t be around much longer ...”

“... of James’s youth to his family, or of the 1880s to Stevenson, or of the 1890s to the actress Elizabeth Robins and her friend Mrs Hugh Bell, Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters shows him joking in congenial company; this is the circle where the late James seems most to have unwound. The bulk of the letters we get here show the social and personal side ...”

“... writing; one sees it in novels by Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe, Sophia Lee, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Inchbald and numerous others. It is frequently amalgamated with a sort of Bluebeard motif: in Inchbald’s A Simple Story the heroine is kept prisoner by her father, whom she has never seen, in his own country house; she is not to enter his rooms, on ...”

“... mess ensued before they established themselves as a grand couple, and she finally ‘mellowed’. Elizabeth Hardwick, a loyal if witty and sceptical friend whose comments always enliven the page and who stayed with McCarthy to the very end, described West succinctly as ‘a husband-type husband’. In handling all the personal material – often dauntingly ...”

“... The American investigative columnist Jack Anderson has had some scoops in his time but none more significant than his revelation – in January 1990 – that in mid-March 1989, three months after Lockerbie, George Bush rang Margaret Thatcher to warn her to ‘cool it’ on the subject. On what seems to have been the very same day, perhaps a few hours earlier, Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Transport, Paul Channon, was the guest of five prominent political correspondents at a lunch at the Garrick Club ...”

“... Sloane’s Milk Chocolate’ through Soho shops. He also married a very wealthy planter’s widow, Elizabeth Rose, who brought him at least £4000 a year from the sugar plantations, a business which he kept up throughout the early 1700s. ‘One had to be back in England to make money out of the colonics,’ Braudel confirms. While Sloane’s average income ...”