“... of the confessors who accompanied most living saints and acted as witnesses and praise-singers. Elizabeth of Hungary, a historical figure who was canonised four years after her death in 1231 by her friend Pope Gregory IX, was written up by the poet Rutebeuf among others: although she was married (the exception among exemplary women), she also turned her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be met in London were likely to be exceptional in some way, like the unfortunate Lopez, Queen Elizabeth’s physician, who suffered the fate intended for Stalin’s doctors. Few members of Shakespeare’s audience can ever have met a Jew. In the popular imagination and on the stage, they were bloodyminded usurers with an inveterate hatred of ...”

“... detail about the recent excavations) and theatre business (including relations with the courts of Elizabeth and James, patrons and censors) is also exemplary. He agrees with the view now widely accepted (and in some measure an achievement of the New Historicists) that the theatre was at least latently a site of subversion, ready to ‘confront Lenten ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”