“... writing; one sees it in novels by Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe, Sophia Lee, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Inchbald and numerous others. It is frequently amalgamated with a sort of Bluebeard motif: in Inchbald’s A Simple Story the heroine is kept prisoner by her father, whom she has never seen, in his own country house; she is not to enter his rooms, on ...”

“... Sloane’s Milk Chocolate’ through Soho shops. He also married a very wealthy planter’s widow, Elizabeth Rose, who brought him at least £4000 a year from the sugar plantations, a business which he kept up throughout the early 1700s. ‘One had to be back in England to make money out of the colonics,’ Braudel confirms. While Sloane’s average income ...”

“... tide.’) The echoes of early Lowell and Keats and the Old Testament have given way to echoes of Elizabeth Bishop and William Carlos Williams. (In one poem, ‘Grosse Fuge’, perhaps the least successful in Atlantis, there are direct references to lines from Bishop and Williams.) Some of the sentiments here are too easy; in ‘Description’, he ...”

“... in one of the letters that Ettinger quotes, professed her undying loyalty (in words borrowed from Elizabeth Barrett Browning): ‘If God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.’ In 1929, Jaspers helped Arendt publish her first book (and dissertation), The Concept of Love in Augustine. For the next few years, she lived in Frankfurt and ...”

“... reputation of an invalid; and so my privacy is respected.’ Rossetti herself was an invalid, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the predecessor to whom she felt she owed so much. As with many Victorian girls, the debility began seemingly without warning or explanation in her teens. Maude’s remark, however, hints at the extent to which physical weakness could ...”

“... turning into dust or sand, and it would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a big ring on Elizabeth Taylor’s finger.’ A decade before Warhol disappeared, he spent his afternoons in business meetings, and his nights at Studio 54. A bedlam of cocaine and orgasms and famous names and Quaaludes and tears, Studio 54 was the endzone of the New York ...”

“... he’d mastered all the tricks of the reviewer’s trade. He damns with faint praise (of Elsie Elizabeth Phare’s The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins he withers, ‘Miss Phare has written a book of 150 pages about a major poet’), charms as he disclaims (reviewing books on architecture: ‘I’d better say at once that I know nothing more about ...”

“... much interest despite her probable charm). The Earl of Rochester tutors and seduces the actress Elizabeth Barry, poses as a mountebank and repents on his deathbed (without Behn’s verifiable friendship with this illustrious rake, Todd’s biography would be considerably shorter). Nell Gwyn, ‘probably’ introduced to Behn by Thomas Otway, calls herself ...”

“... increasingly hard to sustain: James Sharpe’s Bewitching of Anne Gunter includes the story of Elizabeth Stile, executed in 1579, told, for what is I think the first time in modern scholarly literature, as if she believed herself to be a witch. The modern history of the witch-hunt begins with a series of books published nearly thirty years ago by Hugh ...”

“... popularised the term, ‘seraphick love’ with Anne Russell (whom he dubbed ‘Platona’) and Elizabeth Carey (who became his ‘Electra’). It is exceptionally hard to describe what Evelyn felt for these women: probably it is best to say that the concept of platonic love enabled this socially awkward and excessively serious man to talk easily and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is a Joycean ‘collideorscope’ of ‘conglomewriting’. If you’re sceptical about Beckett or Elizabeth Bowen’s familiarity with the Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis or Gerard Murphy’s Early Irish Lyrics, Muldoon argues that there’s no distinction between one text and the next when the féth fíada or ‘magic mist’ comes down. This gives him a free ...”

“... gap is not at all made up for by the ardent love missives with which, in the 1960s, he bombarded Elizabeth Jane Howard, who became his second wife. These seem forced and self-conscious but maybe they wouldn’t if we did not know how things turned out for these two lovers. After they have split up, Howard is routinely referred to as a money-grabbing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Continental context.’ J.A. Froude, A.E. Pollard and J.E. Neale, hagiographers of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, are demolished with equal relish. The pillars of the English historical tradition, whom A-level history students were urged to read uncritically a generation ago, receive a vigorous kicking. Only one merits Norman Davies’s unqualified approval. It ...”