“... windy still almost warm. Between Rupert getting up and him fetching me a cup of tea I reread ‘Elizabeth at Rycote’, an essay in A.L. Rowse’s The English Spirit, published in 1944 and bought, I see from the flyleaf, when I was in Cork in 1963. Rowse figures in it, having walked out from Oxford to Rycote with Bruce McFarlane during the war. Rowse here ...”

“... A wood engraving​ by the illustrator Joan Hassall, who died in 1988, shows Elizabeth Gaskell arriving at the Brontë parsonage. Patrick Brontë is taking Gaskell’s hand; Charlotte stands between them, arms open in a gesture of introduction. We – the spectators, whose gaze Charlotte seems to acknowledge (or is she looking at her father apprehensively?) – stand in the doorway; the participants are framed in the hallway arch, with the curved wooden staircase behind them ...”

“... pushed so intransigently under our noses, is not ‘for its own sake’, it is not Parnassian. For Elizabeth Barrett was on the ball when she applauded the poem: ‘it is so new, ... full of a creeping crawling grotesque life.’ We may have had our fill of creepy-crawlies since: but in 1844 to sympathise with slugs and newts was momentous, and an achievement ...”

“... sense was like a cargo-cult. Among the treasures guaranteed was the common culture of the first Elizabeth and all her successors. If Shakespeare is yours by right, what use is Van Morrison? The national question has already been answered by incomparable endowment: the culture-laden Crown of a pre-eminently civilised state whose riches eclipse all meaner ...”

“... What about Jonson’s gossip to Drummond about the privy membrane which (he said) prevented Elizabeth from having sexual intercourse? Or torturer Topcliffe’s boast that he had felt the breast, legs and belly of the Queen? I offer this not as showing what Topcliffe did but as showing what could be thought and said. Writing on A Midsummer Night’s ...”

“... Sensibility by Edith Charlotte Brown, 1929) to Consequence, or Whatever Became of Charlotte Lucas (Elizabeth Newark, 1997) and Desire & Duty: A Sequel to Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (Ted Bader and Marilyn Bader, 1997) have appeared in print. The further adventures of Isabella Thorpe, Mrs Rushworth and even the family of Mr Collins; the events of ...”

“... like a nightmare, hotted-up Lady Colefax.’ Then this: ‘a three-cornered conversation with Elizabeth [Bowen] on the awfulness of women writers and the nastiness of her friend Mrs Woolf’. ‘There is something wrong with a world in which one meets Mrs Lowinsky and Roger Hinks and Mrs Royde-Smith. They smell of middlebrow.’ The Journal will record ...”

“... There are fewer than a hundred parishes to give a base for the period before the accession of Elizabeth I. It may also have been a mistake to have selected parishes by size, for the pattern of child and infant deaths seems to have differed according to the size of the parish. But the Cambridge Group were working with over three million figures, and it ...”

“... is, at best, fruitless egoism. This doctrine, which would have been music to the ears of Elizabeth I, had some distinguished adherents. The period of Lipsius’s life and influence is the period of the external conservatism and internal radicalism of Montaigne and of Bacon. It is also the period of the Family of Love, the heretical sect with which ...”

“... an evaluation of its chances involves understanding the problems and aims of Cardinal Fleury and Elizabeth Farnese. Even though the exploration of English Jacobitism in this book is superficial, the European dimension makes it a great deal more than the exploration of an anachronistic quirk of Scottish history. It is natural that this book, while ostensibly ...”

“... century been denied proper access to the political process: but from Katherine Philips through Elizabeth Barrett Browning to the present day, many women poets have commented on politics, and with only one British woman poet Paulin’s anthology is sadly defective here. The Romantic section would have been enlivened by Annabella Plumptre’s ...”

“... like a man without a skin. Unswerving truth is all very well in exemplary radical fiction. In Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art the noble young Henry, brought up in uncivilised Africa, entertainingly floors his clerical uncle and pliant cousin by regularly subjecting their conversation to a Socratic dialectic. In real life, Mrs Inchbald’s triumphs ...”

“... was at his suggestion that three unknown designers were brought in to do the costumes. These were Elizabeth Montgomery and her two partners Margaret and Sophia Harris, the Motleys, who specialised in producing stunning effects with the cheapest materials. The OUDS Romeo and Juliet entranced all who saw it and was the trial run for the triumphant version ...”

“... mocked for setting herself up in business as an alternative monarch. But at that time Queen Elizabeth and her heir enjoyed much greater prestige: until 1990 the symbolic order remained largely intact, though many of its props had gone. Now, the alternative is a lot more serious. Anthony Barnett puts this argument strongly in This Time, a study of ...”

“... of May. British politicians were persuaded to spend £7.6 billion on the new vessels, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, despite having too few planes with which to equip them and only one ageing store ship to supply them. The military leadership also pushed for the Royal Navy to form ‘Littoral Strike Groups’ for international ...”