“... 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 ...”

“... a naval vessel”, with all the guns run out’; perhaps more tellingly, a character in an Elizabeth Bowen novel based partly on Bowra is said, when entering a room, to be always ‘delighted to see himself’. He spoke with a booming voice, which got louder as he got deafer: ‘He really ought to be fitted with a silencer,’ one friend ...”

“... Normans, with their castles, and later the neo-Palladians, who imposed rigid Italianate symmetry. Elizabeth, queen of ‘merry England’, was a Good Thing, ‘just, sensible and far-sightedly astute’, and under her the ‘stalwart Gothic tradition’ was largely protected from foreign infection. The Stuarts, on the other hand, were Bad, ‘despotic and ...”

“... 1950; the birth dates for Beier’s sample (which includes oral histories gathered in the 1970s by Elizabeth Roberts, one of the method’s great pioneers, for whom Beier worked), by contrast, range from 1872 to 1958. Beier, in other words, is examining the practices not only of Fisher’s informants’ generation, but also those of their parents and their ...”

“... believes that in all her favourite work of the period – and that stretches to the writings of Elizabeth Bowen and to Peter Grimes, the opera with which Benjamin Britten returned from the States to England in 1942 – we encounter sensibilities thoroughly au fait with European modernism who nonetheless adopted the passion for the particular that is the ...”

“... been women, not men, who have most carefully examined the features of such beautiful women, of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, for example, or Hollywood’s choices for the part of Helen. My first Helen was Rossana Podestà, in the 1956 Cinemascope spectacular. She wore what looked like a swimming cap of platinum curls, and played Helen as an ...”

“... story goes, after he circulated his version of this bawdy canto at court, and his godmother Queen Elizabeth ordered him to translate the rest of the poem as a punishment.) Cuts as short as three stanzas are made to no obvious purpose. The lunar episode is cut off in the middle. But a greater drawback is the lack of notes. This may have been another ...”

“... be poison. Orwell argues that murder is no longer what it used to be, and cites the 1944 case of Elizabeth Jones, an 18-year-old, and an American army deserter, Karl Hulten, who went on a killing spree together, known as the Cleft Chin Murders. They were a Bonnie and Clyde pair, a symptom of the brutality of war and of approaching modernity in dear old ...”

“... form, and several transform it into a vehicle for poetic liberty. At the more extreme end is Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sonnet’, which, with 14 half-rhymed or unrhymed lines of six syllables or fewer, looks like the left-hand half of a sonnet cracked down the middle. It begins ‘Caught – the bubble/in the spirit level’ and goes on ‘Freed – the ...”

“... and social-services groups, as well as longtime residents, many of them disabled and elderly. Mary Elizabeth Phillips, who arrived in San Francisco after getting married in 1937, will be 98 when she is driven out of her home of more than half a century. In many other places eviction means you go and find a comparable place to live: in San Francisco that’s ...”

“... him. (Van Dine’s 19th rule: ‘The motive should always be personal.’) Crowe, whom Mary Elizabeth Braddon admired, fell out of favour (Dickens wrote that she had gone ‘stark mad – and stark naked – on the spirit-rapping imposition. She was found t’other day in the street, clothed only in her chastity, a pocket-handkerchief and a visiting ...”

“... herself begin to turn people into legends. While still in Arizona she had written to her friend Elizabeth Sergeant, a critic for the New Republic: Dear Elsie: I’ve been hard hit by new ideas of late and am as happy as possible. I’ve caught step at last. Am just back from a long overland trip with the priest out to his Indian missions. A string trio of ...”

“... historians agree on the amazing degree of indifference to religion that characterised the reign of Elizabeth I.’ A book promises most when it is unwritten; certainly the versions of De tribus that were actually composed lacked the explosive revelations it was supposed to contain. The Latin De tribus never even made it onto the Index of Prohibited ...”

“... or both of these women, June with her ‘Glinda the Good Witch vibe’ and Lydia the ‘small-town Elizabeth Taylor’, harbours guilty secrets somewhere the narrator’s torch doesn’t reach. The first-person narrators tend to be further, in emotional terms, from the blast, though the father of the groom-who-never-was puts in an appearance some way into the ...”

“... I call Me’. Split personalities and doubles are common in her work. In The Bird’s Nest, Elizabeth Richmond discovers through hypnosis that she has four different selves. The two sisters in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Merricat and Constance, are complementary: Constance is shy and uneasy; Merricat is outgoing, bold, superstitious and ...”