“... have taken it all so personally, since it’s difficult to find peers for White anywhere. David Marr’s excellent and sympathetic biography confirmed White’s singularity and perhaps even his greatness, but the recent Letters, astutely edited and accompanied by acerbic and timely interpolations, reveals the Nobel laureate as a man lagging well ...”

“... the reality: £4 billion over budget for Crossrail is a parsimonious bargain for the rebranded Elizabeth Line. This money is flighty, but it is very serious. It maps the territory where we might be able to pick up the threads of the General Theory of Everything. A lot of people are talking, releasing statements, providing updates, playing themselves in ...”

“... constantly to flatten himself into a cartoon. We come to understand why Keats was fond of him and Elizabeth Barrett admired him, as well as the reasons his son despised him and his painting failed. Even so, Haydon is not the hero, or even quite the centre of the book. A Sultry Month is a demonstration of how martyrdom takes place in a corner. We see exactly ...”

“... cooked and ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background’, followed by a plain ...”

“... And in the half-century since his death, the royal roll-call has been further extended. Queen Elizabeth II is his great-great-niece, King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden is his great-great-grandson, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark is one great-great-granddaughter, and the former Queen Anne-Marie of Greece is another. To describe him as well connected would be ...”

“... enclosure riot was. Only seven out of 107 riots that found their way into Manning’s sources in Elizabeth I’s reign involved more than 30 people (which did not stop the vengeful queen from recommending the use of martial law as the quickest way of bringing such ‘incorrigible rogues’ to the gallows). The Queen’s bloodymindedness reflects a general ...”

“... Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), the biggest seller of them all, is a significant exception. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was the most prolific of the sensationalists, publishing more than eighty novels, as well as poems, short stories and plays. She began to write at a time when the publishing market offered a wide variety of outlets designed to appeal to various ...”

“... sketch out a simpler diet than we’re used to, an equivalent for rainy, hectic Britain of what Elizabeth David discerned in the Mediterranean diet when she called it ‘the rational, right and proper food for human beings to eat’. Except there’s no romantic sense, as there was in David, of a benign landscape ...”

“... and Scott Fitzgerald. This may be all to the good, though it leads him to such remarks as that Elizabeth Bennet’s ‘gay resilience in a society tending always towards dull conformity would make her a worthy heroine in a Stendhal novel, which cannot be said for many English heroines’. Perhaps it cannot at the moment, but no doubt it will be soon: to ...”

“... the man and the nature of his faith is his weeping for joy on hearing the prophecy of Elizabeth Barton, the nun of Kent, that if Henry were to marry Anne, he would not remain king for long. Once Fisher and More and a handful of public opponents had been crushed, Henry proceded to dissolve the monasteries, and to attack abuses relating to the ...”

“... overheated version of Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), Clift lets the women take centre-stage; it’s Elizabeth Taylor’s film, then Katharine Hepburn’s. Here, as in Freud, he’s a ‘listener’. Of all the early films, it’s in the last, Vittorio De Sica’s excellent (though butchered) Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953) that Clift takes the greatest ...”

“... the literary historian’s insistence on evolution. The first poem he has chosen, an epitaph by Elizabeth, Lady Tanfield, is notable partly because it reveals the scope of the research which has gone into the preparation of this anthology (the text is inscribed on Sir Lawrence Tanfield’s tomb in Burton Parish Church), and partly because it is so ...”

“... the pesky new medium to ‘crawl back into its tube’. It all went wrong. The 1957 film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, was epic only in the scale of its box-office failure. The chronically self-destructive Clift lost his good looks in an automobile crash during production, and has two disconcertingly different faces at various points in the ...”

“... fine and noble – admirable even – except perhaps in the case of Betjeman’s relationship with Elizabeth Cavendish, a woman with whom he shared much of his later life, and about whom Hillier tells us very little. Betjeman and Cavendish met in 1951 at a dinner party; he was 45 and she was 25. Cavendish was the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, a cousin of ...”

“... Civil war is an unpleasant business and the story that unfolds in the letters and diaries of Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, the Canadian diplomat with whom she was in love for more than thirty years, is not a happy one. This was not so much what the publishers are pleased to call on the dust jacket ‘the love affair of a lifetime’, more like a fight to the death ...”