“... 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 ...”

“... increasingly hard to sustain: James Sharpe’s Bewitching of Anne Gunter includes the story of Elizabeth Stile, executed in 1579, told, for what is I think the first time in modern scholarly literature, as if she believed herself to be a witch. The modern history of the witch-hunt begins with a series of books published nearly thirty years ago by Hugh ...”

“... The seventh volume of Russell’s Collected Papers contains the core of a book which he never completed. He stopped working on it, probably because he felt that he could not honestly go on. He had hoped that Wittgenstein would approve of what he had been writing, but when they met in May 1913, Wittgenstein told him that it was all wrong, and, as Russell admitted to Ottoline Morrell, he did not know how to answer Wittgenstein’s objections ...”

“... Wilson and Callaghan, but with Heath and Macmillan. She comes second only to Churchill and Queen Elizabeth I. Her supporters condemn, as she does, the whole of the post-1945 regime. It is the constituency, more than any other, that was deeply offended by our vote. However, the constituency is not as big as the noise it makes would imply. The most recent MORI ...”

“... the light it throws on its historical context – the state of British science, from Victoria I to Elizabeth II. The external form is astonishingly permanent. The annual meeting leaps across the map, from city to city, occasioning civic and academic ceremonial, presidential pontifications and gee-whiz popularisations, visits to industry, restrained junketing ...”

“... by an English electorate. Even for Gladstone’s Liberal colleagues (though not for him), and for Elizabeth I or Lloyd George, they were a costly and debilitating diversion from more important matters. But except in the late 18th century, Ireland denied its administrators, even full-time, well-meaning ones, the illusion that overrule would be acceptable if ...”

“... though they are, but in the famous lines from ‘The Second Anniversarie’ about young Elizabeth Drury’s body:                              we understood Her by her sight, her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheekes, and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say, her bodie thought. ...”

“... whim, just as the events of Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas are cast in a perpetual autumnal haze (as Elizabeth Bowen noted), in defiance of the usual arrangement of the seasons. Anglo-Irish disdain for the tedious requirements of naturalism? Certainly a moral pattern takes precedence over verisimilitude, in Irish fiction of the last century, and it’s usually ...”

“... Britain and on the Continent with a succession of séances, two or three of which were attended by Elizabeth and Robert Browning. On the first occasion, an unseen hand lowered a clematis wreath (laurel was hard to come by) on Elizabeth’s brow. She believed in spiritual manifestations, but Robert, though he shared her ...”

“... would both draw on and add to recent research. Some of the contributions are of high quality: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s survey of ‘Women and Work’, for example, or Linda Gardiner’s study of the role of women in science (or more exactly, the role of the Marquise du Châtelet). The marquise is one of a dozen or so individuals who come to life in ...”

“... in the friendship of Tunda, Branco and Reisiger; in Tunda’s precipitate marriage in 1914 with Elizabeth Kovacs (the state of Austria-Hungary); and in her unnatural desertion of him for the artsy-crafty lesbian Jolanth Szatmary (the defection of Austria’s Slavs). If the ‘persons’ at the heart of Roth’s early books are little more than perceptive ...”

“... by terrors. Influenced probably by the talk about her father’s first cousin, the author of Elizabeth and her German Garden, she announced at the age of nine that she was ‘going to be a writer’. Antony Alpers notices a death wish in her very early work. ‘I shall end of course by killing myself.’ she wrote, aged 18, in a note book. It was as if ...”

“... contemporaries. Books like Erich Gruen’s The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (1974) and Elizabeth Rawson’s Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic (1985), by describing the landscape around Cicero, have made this easier to do. But they have also provided negative proof that the only way to produce a coherent narrative of the late Republic is ...”