“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of an affluent London vintner, he was fortunate as a teenager to gain a place in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, whose husband was Edward’s second surviving son. Aged about 15, Chaucer ‘steps off the page as a fashion plate, dressed to the nines in clothes so breathtakingly fashionable and daring that contemporary commentators condemned them as ...”

“... the title is another line from an advert – imagines what it would be like to drive alongside Elizabeth Taylor in midtown Manhattan (the windshield is a picture of the United Nations building turned on its side). Hamilton produced a few more semi-figurative combinations of sexy commodities and commodified women in a sustained attempt ‘to capture those ...”

“... the huge success of the screen version of her 1935 novel National Velvet, starring a 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. It sometimes seems that the enthronement of Virginia Woolf in the canon has entailed the demotion of a whole generation and a bit of women, not just Bagnold (born 1889) but Rose Macaulay (born 1881) and Sylvia Townsend Warner (born 1893). This ...”

“... and the general tendency to blame the victim. In Germaine, her unauthorised biography of Greer, Elizabeth Kleinhenz is sometimes awkwardly caught between starstruck admiration for Greer and irritation that Greer refused to co-operate with her project in any way.1 The irritation is understandable: if, like Greer, you sell your archive to a major library, you ...”

“... 1846, Hayter’s account weaves together the lives of the famous, the obscure and the forgotten. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning plan their elopement. Samuel Rogers entertains the Gräfin Hahn-Hahn, a romantic novelist who has come to meet her English public and disappoints them by turning out to have false teeth and a glass eye. The painter Benjamin ...”

“... to the industrial conflicts of early 20th-century America. A speech given by the labour organiser Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at a silk-workers’ strike in Paterson, New Jersey in 1913 inspired in him a sense of ‘the likeness of all human beings and their problems’, a feeling he could still recall in his eighties. The conception of socialism as the natural ...”

“... for this portrayal of the Woolfs’ marriage is Virginia’s novel Flush, an imagined biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel. Woolf started work on Flush as a relaxation. ‘The gods of literature,’ Mitz’s narrator remarks, ‘punish writers who begin books in this spirit,’ and she ended up writing it as carefully and painfully as her other ...”