“... an admirable inversion, a sort of in-between sex with many good features. Radical feminists like Elizabeth Wolstenholme argued that menstruation is the unnatural result of male sexual appetite and that in a natural, healthy state women, like the lower mammals, would not be constantly available to the opposite sex. In short, every view found its biological ...”

“... pots boiling at once. Unlike most of the major Victorian women novelists, with the exception of Elizabeth Gaskell, Oliphant was also a mother, and one who professed in her Autobiography that ‘at my most ambitious of times I would rather my children had remembered me as their mother than in any other way.’ When her husband died after seven years of ...”

“... while wooing a young woman called Rene Wright, while needing to shed Wright in order to have Elizabeth Cheatham – a girl unknown to Mizener who is here honoured with a whole chapter, though it seems unlikely that there was a conquest. Saunders knows about eighteen or so affairs of varying depth and length and misery, including the one with Jean ...”

“... look at the work of certain women writers – Eva Gore Booth, Edith Somerville and Violet Martin, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, each of whom has her own chapter – and how they dealt with same-sex love. Some of these women were, as far as we know, gay; others were not. The issues are clearer in other essays – in Éibhear Walshe’s piece on ...”

“... his inwardness with Italy cleverly in his earlier thriller, A Rich Full Death, set in Robert and Elizabeth Browning’s 1850s Florence. Ratking should set him up for as many Italian jobs as he has imagination ...”

“... old Republican and Communist Peadar O’Donnell. It attracted an eclectic range of contributors: Elizabeth Bowen, John Hewitt, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Hubert Butler, Flann O’Brien, Liam O’Flaherty and others. ‘Cannot we all meet, throwing in what we have?’ Bowen wrote in her essay ‘The Big House’, published in the Bell’s first ...”

“... for Scotland, in 1996); the numbering of monarchs (an issue at the accessions of Edward VII and Elizabeth II); and the official neglect (usually philatelic) of Scottish history and achievement have marked the wayside of the long march to devolution. The creation of the new Parliament itself gave birth to another spurious controversy: should the old Royal ...”

“... people at home and abroad. Yet neither is considered to be a novelist in the sense that, say, Elizabeth Bowen is. Her novel of 1929, The Last September, is also a lament for a vanishing class, that of the highly privileged Anglo-Irish ascendancy. In describing the three novels of those two years in this way – as chronicles of disaster – we blur one of ...”

“... into’ or the progress from eiders to eiderdown. Such lines and shorelines bring to mind Elizabeth Bishop, littered as they are with correspondences – a turtle like ‘a covered wagon’ or the ocean ‘wrinkling like tinfoil’. She lays the paint on more thickly than Bishop: but can she rise to the grandiloquence of ‘At the Fishhouses’? At ...”

“... hay cart; that she has a brother called Thomas and another called William and a twin sister called Elizabeth; that her mother recently died of cancer; that her father is called Hastings and is a retired colonel. That is about it. This might serve as a modest sketch of someone’s life, but is wholly lacking in the richness of detail one can expect to emerge ...”

“... Social Welfare, Ian Gough’s The Political Economy of the Welfare State and Michael Harloe and Elizabeth Lebas’s City, Class and Capital. These books, and others in the same genre, reject the ameliorist tradition, and this is a healthy new development. University teachers should do what they are best at doing. They should use their ...”

“... himself as a man who has completed his escape from his origins in Croydon. This is all rather like Elizabeth Bennet’s joke when she is asked how she began to love Mr Darcy: ‘I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.’ But in Jane Austen’s moral world, a heroine would not in all earnestness attempt a kind of ...”

“... the transcript of their news conference at West Point (see the New York Times, 28 January), where Elizabeth Swift says quite explicitly that Newsweek lied about what she said, inventing a story about torture (much amplified by the media) that had nothing to do with the facts. It was the leap from a specific experience – unpleasant, anguished, miserably long ...”

“... pregnant with a Plantagenet child. Too much depends on the supposition that after his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville Edward IV would have sired no more bastards: that king’s reputation runs another way. As deputy of Calais, Lisle was evidently conscientious and reasonably thorough – not by any means the ninny that recent tradition had made him – but ...”

“... with side-glances at Shirley Robin Letwin and the conservative potential in Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Other than that, some of the conservatives are closer to liberalism than others; some accept, other reject, ideas of a social contract and of natural law; all, to a greater or lesser extent, exalt custom, intuitive morality ...”