“... One of the general effects of hero-worship is its tendency to marshal resentment in those who claim themselves no party to the admiration. A good example of this offers itself at the opening of Vanity Fair – ‘A Novel without a Hero’ – when the single-minded Becky Sharp, high in a coach bound for Russell Square, flings a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary out of the window to land on the grass at the feet of her former teacher, a sworn disciple of the Great Lexicographer ...”

“... Irish pride and nationalism have always been magnified in the United States. In her autobiography, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the leader of the American Communist Party, described the attitudes of her Irish-born mother and American-born father: ‘Mama did not deny the faults or glorify the virtues of the Irish, as our father did. We were amused at this and often ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... under his signature. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a small flood of memoirs – of which Elizabeth Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994) was the most notable – and published correspondence and interviews with his friends showed him full of acid-tongued contempt for the stupidities of Soviet bureaucracy. Even the famously patriotic ...”

“... the position.’ Her subjects have changed too: the wives are more contemporary and productive (Elizabeth Hardwick, Sylvia Plath). And the text grows more polemical, as when she tells us: It drives me absolutely bonkers that the mythology of Zelda, as endlessly repeated by Scott’s biographers … dictates some narrative that she was not disciplined ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the New York Review of Books and soon a column in Harper’s. Was she the second coming of Elizabeth Hardwick, or a kinder, gentler James Wood? In ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, she looked at books by Joseph O’Neill and Tom McCarthy. Realism, it seemed, was on the run, and it turned out that novels in English could still be vehicles for avant-garde ...”

“... The Grammar was widely read for its opulent verse translations (‘the sense aches at them’, Elizabeth Montagu wrote), but Jones was careful to make the poetry accessible to mainstream neoclassical taste. Hāfiz was not only exotic and strange but ‘the Anacreon of Persia’; in Jones’s hands Hāfiz and his predecessor Firdausi sometimes end up ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Hopper watched Dean try to create the edgy Jett Rink by keeping his bladder full for a scene with Elizabeth Taylor, and then, after blowing his lines, dealing with his awe of Taylor by emptying his bladder in full sight of her, the crew and several thousand movie-struck onlookers. (A good moment to recall Laurence Olivier’s comment to Dustin Hoffman, who ...”