“... in my grandmother’s house, the house where my father had lived with his sisters. It came from Elizabeth Craig’s Household Library and was called 1000 Household Hints, published in 1947 by Collins, a Glasgow firm. ‘I know from experience how many minor emergencies a housewife has to meet in the course of her daily routine,’ Craig writes in her ...”

“... genius who nonetheless wrote brilliantly, out of their whole autonomy: Lowell’s second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, for example. Jean Rhys made her genius out of her abjection. Stafford’s marriage to Lowell lasted eight years. Throughout the relationship, he was unpredictable and violent, already manifesting the mental instability which would necessitate ...”

“... Priscilla has an affair with Walter, who is the mentor of Phoebe, who forges a portrait of Elizabeth, who everyone loves. One of his quieter books is Twenty Lines a Day (1988), the result of his decision to follow Stendhal’s advice to begin each day by writing something – anything – without hesitation or revision. It’s a collection of pieces ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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. ...”

“... quickly backed by its board of trustees, unlike the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, who apologised for her testimony and resigned soon after. Claudine Gay also apologised. Her bosses on the Harvard Corporation kept their counsel for several days but eventually gave her their backing – just about. ‘Our extensive ...”

“... was so recognised until the run ended with William McKie, knighted after he had conducted at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953.The person to whom most credit should go for moderating this traditional prejudice and opening the door to a new era of composition was an Irishman. Stanford was born in Dublin in 1852 to a musical family: his father was a ...”

“... the Gemäldegalerie houses Gothic statues of wimpled ladies, a Virgin Mary with St Elizabeth, two miserable-looking canons from Utrecht. Goldin’s own phantom is her sister. Sisters, Saints and Sibyls is projected onto three parallel screens, like a triptych. It was first shown in 2004 in the chapel of the Salpêtrière in Paris, an octagonal ...”

“... too dowdy, perhaps, and too complex. But now it’s all the rage. Just possibly the death of Queen Elizabeth II, which brought an end to a long age of stability for the British monarchy, has opened up the prospect that the country might one day want to think of alternatives. Whatever the reason, the resurgence in interest is to be welcomed. The republic is a ...”

“... IV), and not until the accession of Henry VII and his speedy marriage to Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth of York, thereby unifying their bloodlines, was the breach healed. For the Tudors, the dates of the Wars of the Roses were 1399 to 1486.For many years, the favourite academic approach to all this was through ‘bastard feudalism’, a term used to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... geopolitical reality of the nation-state’. In Austen’s world ‘local gentry’ (Elizabeth Bennet) marries into the ‘national élite’ (Darcy) and, through that transaction, what in Northanger Abbey Austen calls ‘the central part of England’ comes to serve as a metonym for ‘England’ tout court. The maps are designed to shed light ...”

“... Around the same time, Edith too was hitting the jackpot with her full-hearted Fanfare for Elizabeth. And when Cyril Connolly – himself a somewhat Osbertish phenomenon, without the wealth – devoted a 1947 number of Horizon to persuading the world, and himself, that the Sitwells had ‘since 1938 grown enormously in stature’, Osbert’s pleasure ...”

“... to avenge. The story she principally corrects, derived from Charlotte’s hints, was elaborated by Elizabeth Gaskell in her hugely influential Life of Charlotte Brontë and amended but not substantially challenged by later biographers. It had to do with a family of shy, precocious children who (as Ellen Nussey remarked) resembled ‘growing potatoes in a ...”