“... about the nature of the real’, it falls apart: we should be and are in no doubt that John and Elizabeth Proctor are unjustly accused. Miller has p0inted out that The Crucible tends to be staged in countries which are about to enter or leave a period of dictatorship. This is not because the play is a philosophical treatise, or indeed a documentary about a ...”

“... belief that A Midsummer Night’s Dream might reflect aspects of the performances put on before Elizabeth I at Kenilworth, 12 miles from Stratford, in 1575. Harry Goldingham, the actor who played Arion, apologetically tore off his costume and revealed his true identity in a way that’s very like Snug the joiner’s declaration ‘that I as Snug the joiner ...”

“... winning through against the forces of darkness, like Jane Eyre, like Anne of Green Gables, like Elizabeth I. Read Oranges now and you will still find in it the exuberance and the craft of a jack-in-the-box. There is so much energy stowed away in those neat, demure little sentences. It will leap out and cuff you hard. You can feel that will in the way ...”

“... station./Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small’ against the author of ‘Arches’ – besides, Elizabeth Bishop was a great admirer of both. From ‘The Payne Whitney Poems’, I ranged happily over the rest of The Morning of the Poem (1980), and then the Selected and Collected Poems of 1990 and 1993. The Collected was never published in the UK, but the ...”

“... utterances – ‘you are now husband and wife’; ‘I name this ship Queen Elizabeth’ – make themselves true by being uttered.) In part, Callon has in mind loosely ‘economic’ practices such as marketing and accountancy, and the Enron scandal has certainly focused attention on how key data such as firms’ earnings are ...”

“... what the perfect servant could do. But Lucy has her dark counterpart in the terrible Miss Kilman, Elizabeth Dalloway’s governess. ‘Bitter and burning’, she is the ugly, angry poor who are always with us, ‘with the power and taciturnity of some prehistoric monster’. But though ancient she is also yet to come. ‘She had always earned her living. Her ...”

“... has hitched a ride on the Mr Darcy plotline, but without bothering to give her heroine any of Elizabeth Bennet’s spirit – raising a reprise of the Bridget question, why would a man of any style or substance fall for a lummox like her? To which Meyer offers two answers, one conventional and one less so: because she’s the avatar of the audience, which ...”

“... an English Madame de Staël. Her competitor for this honour – and another of her guests – was Elizabeth Montagu, against whom Hester shone for her excesses. ‘Mrs Montagu … reasons well, and harangues well, but wit she has none,’ Fanny Burney wrote. ‘Mrs Thrale has almost too much; for when she is in spirits, it bursts forth in torrents almost ...”

“... prairie populism of the turn of the century was still an animating inspiration. Arthur Senior and Elizabeth Schlesinger believed in the political necessity of an educated citizenry and a muscular government that could restrain the market. State education was an article of faith. When the family moved from Ohio to Massachusetts for Arthur Senior to take up a ...”

“... five stanzas, ending with a cleverly ironic twist. His aunt Jane sent the poem to her cousin Elizabeth Sherwood Rinehart, who passed it to her mother-in-law, Mary Roberts Rinehart, a popular mystery writer. Ashbery was told his poem had received ‘great acclaim’. Having thus conquered the realm of poetry, for the next few years he turned his attention ...”

“... during the late 1740s and 1750s (among them Pope’s friend Ralph Allen and the bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu) and did well from the subscription sales of her novels, but it’s less clear how Collier managed. The Cry was written and published during the years Fielding and Collier lodged together in London, in Beauford Buildings just off the Strand. The ...”

“... knows she is really dead.Summerscale mentions in passing that Fodor has begun psychoanalysis with Elizabeth Severn, an analysand of Sándor Ferenczi and another member of the institute. Severn, like Ferenczi, maintained that patients’ accounts of their sexual abuse as children were based on fact (Freud had argued that it was impossible to know when memories ...”

“... the weather. Peter, their tenth child, said that he was a secret agent who worked for Queen Elizabeth. Brian, their fourth child, seemed well enough until, aged 22, he shot and killed his girlfriend, then himself. None of the Galvin siblings knew that Brian had been prescribed Navane, an antipsychotic. Mimi told her youngest children that he’d died in ...”

“... trading, Taverner argues, remained remarkably unchanged in its essentials from the last days of Elizabeth I to the outbreak of the First World War: ‘street sellers came from a similar swathe of the working poor, trod the streets with similar tools and tactics, and played a similarly vital role in the city’s food supply.’ But as hawkers performed the ...”

“... in his time, and yet who see the truth of his writings just as much as the courtiers of Queen Elizabeth did.’Literary scholars have been readier than historians to explore how Britain’s 350-year connection with extra-European empire shaped and complicated the identities and patriotisms within it. Even now, imperial history is still sometimes pursued ...”