“... there were few motor-cars, there were few people.’ (Cyril Connolly hadn’t yet got there.) And Elizabeth David herself couldn’t have found fault with the food. Her mother for the time being was calm, a pleasure to be with. ‘So there we sat Chez Schwob, my mother and I, sun-warmed, looking at the sea and tossing boats, drinking a modest apéritif ...”

“... as Professor Mebane calls it, was channelled into the cult-imagery which surrounded Queen Elizabeth. She was depicted as a new Astraea, the Goddess of Justice returning to earth to usher in the Golden Age. By extension, this reformist rhetoric was also used to vindicate imperial ambitions. England’s first toe-hold in the New World, Virginia, was ...”

“... and England’? Mr Baker shows a marked tendency to opt out. He declares the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II his formal end-point, but has trouble getting through 1945. A.P. Herbert’s ‘Mr Churchill’ is there to remind us that ‘Our Finest Hour revealed our Finest Man.’ But after that the story dies away in minor ditties by Sagittarius, Noel Coward ...”

“... life, and they settled in a tiny villa outside Rapallo. When Florence died, Max in old age married Elizabeth Jungmann, who had looked after the German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, and had more late years of wedded bliss. Max is not a specially good letter-writer but he does come over in every turn of phrase, and shares himself in each epistolary friendship. He ...”

“... wrote the story after he had been in Berlin with Harold Nicolson, and it was reprinted in 1937 by Elizabeth Bowen in the Faber Book of Short Stories. I would unhesitatingly say that it is far better, more unforgettable, than anything by the two Jacks, but it hardly matters who wrote it, and its author will no doubt disappear from public view before they ...”

“... this country. It judges that Christopher Fry has a place in conversation, but not Roger Fry, nor Elizabeth Fry. The spy Fuchs has a substantial entry, but whereas the Macmillan Encyclopedia adds ‘his motives were idealistic,’ Pan considers it wiser to leave out that possibly unpatriotic thought. Ordinary people are of course not interested in French ...”

“... to avenge. The story she principally corrects, derived from Charlotte’s hints, was elaborated by Elizabeth Gaskell in her hugely influential Life of Charlotte Brontë and amended but not substantially challenged by later biographers. It had to do with a family of shy, precocious children who (as Ellen Nussey remarked) resembled ‘growing potatoes in a ...”

“... tide.’) The echoes of early Lowell and Keats and the Old Testament have given way to echoes of Elizabeth Bishop and William Carlos Williams. (In one poem, ‘Grosse Fuge’, perhaps the least successful in Atlantis, there are direct references to lines from Bishop and Williams.) Some of the sentiments here are too easy; in ‘Description’, he ...”

“... much interest despite her probable charm). The Earl of Rochester tutors and seduces the actress Elizabeth Barry, poses as a mountebank and repents on his deathbed (without Behn’s verifiable friendship with this illustrious rake, Todd’s biography would be considerably shorter). Nell Gwyn, ‘probably’ introduced to Behn by Thomas Otway, calls herself ...”

“... he’d mastered all the tricks of the reviewer’s trade. He damns with faint praise (of Elsie Elizabeth Phare’s The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins he withers, ‘Miss Phare has written a book of 150 pages about a major poet’), charms as he disclaims (reviewing books on architecture: ‘I’d better say at once that I know nothing more about ...”

“... geopolitical reality of the nation-state’. In Austen’s world ‘local gentry’ (Elizabeth Bennet) marries into the ‘national élite’ (Darcy) and, through that transaction, what in Northanger Abbey Austen calls ‘the central part of England’ comes to serve as a metonym for ‘England’ tout court. The maps are designed to shed light ...”

“... Around the same time, Edith too was hitting the jackpot with her full-hearted Fanfare for Elizabeth. And when Cyril Connolly – himself a somewhat Osbertish phenomenon, without the wealth – devoted a 1947 number of Horizon to persuading the world, and himself, that the Sitwells had ‘since 1938 grown enormously in stature’, Osbert’s pleasure ...”

“... is a Joycean ‘collideorscope’ of ‘conglomewriting’. If you’re sceptical about Beckett or Elizabeth Bowen’s familiarity with the Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis or Gerard Murphy’s Early Irish Lyrics, Muldoon argues that there’s no distinction between one text and the next when the féth fíada or ‘magic mist’ comes down. This gives him a free ...”

“... gap is not at all made up for by the ardent love missives with which, in the 1960s, he bombarded Elizabeth Jane Howard, who became his second wife. These seem forced and self-conscious but maybe they wouldn’t if we did not know how things turned out for these two lovers. After they have split up, Howard is routinely referred to as a money-grabbing ...”

“... Continental context.’ J.A. Froude, A.E. Pollard and J.E. Neale, hagiographers of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, are demolished with equal relish. The pillars of the English historical tradition, whom A-level history students were urged to read uncritically a generation ago, receive a vigorous kicking. Only one merits Norman Davies’s unqualified approval. It ...”