“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... lips tremble; and softly, effortlessly, their fingers intertwined.   ‘Catherine-Nicaise-Elizabeth Leroux, of Sassetot-la-Guerrière, for fifty-four years’ service at the same farm, a silver medal – worth twenty-five francs!’ Flaubert’s proto-cinematic montage crashes the two centres of interest against each other to vividly ambiguous ...”

“... support: Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, Theodore Roethke, Lillian Hellman, Peter Taylor, Elizabeth Hardwick in America; Patrick White in Australia. Books previously declined were now published. There were reprints. There was an interest, and it would grow. It was all good, but it had come too late. In 1968 Bill Blake died and Stead was consumed with ...”

“... in line to the throne. King George VI was 41 when Edward VIII unexpectedly abdicated. And Queen Elizabeth II spent her first decade with no inkling that she might one day be called upon to reign. Taken together, these examples suggest that the best preparation for the job of sovereign is not to be prepared for it at all, or not to be too well prepared for ...”

“... Papers and Legal Instruments, Published Dec. 24, MDCCXCV and Attributed to Shakspeare, Queen Elizabeth, and Henry Earl of Southampton (1796) is the prosecution case Malone was born to present, and he relishes every one of the 424 pages he takes up in doing so. (‘If he does not overpower his adversaries,’ complained a dashed but still defiant ...”

“... women for women readers. McGann indeed represents the later 1820s by Felicia Hemans and Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, and describes the phase as Romanticism’s ‘commercialised nightmare’, but not, it seems, unhappily. Romanticism proper is for him the glittering, commercialised, non-natural side of the period’s literary production. His anthology dreams ...”

“... of apostates (subject to legal disabilities or punishable by death for their ‘treason’). Ann Elizabeth Mayer, in her Encyclopedia article on human rights, explains how the Organisation of the Islamic Conference – the world’s leading international Islamic body – has introduced ‘Islamic’ qualifications into its Declaration on Human Rights in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than did other writing women of her time, even those in (moderately) high positions, such as Elizabeth Montagu. Her rehabilitation began with the publication of Turkish Letters at the end of the 18th century, during the Revolutionary period, when daring behaviour, interrogation of received ideas and feminine investigation of social structures and manners ...”

“... sensuality imported into the grey boneyard of Fifties England by Lawrence Durrell and Elizabeth David. His dustwrapper should have been designed by John Minton. You can smell the wild garlic, the turpentine. Rustic excesses out of David Rudkin or Edward Bond, scythe-carrying yokel mobs baying for blood, are intercut with a Paul Nash vision of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by. Dewey was quite willing to say of a vicious act that it was sinful, and of ‘2+2=5’ and ‘Elizabeth the First’s reign ended in 1623’ that these sentences are false. But he was unwilling to say that a power not ourselves had forbidden cruelty, or that these false sentences fail to represent accurately the way Reality is in itself. He thought it ...”

“... in West London. William was 23, Susan Yeats (or Lily, as she was known within the family) was 22, Elizabeth (Lolly) 20. Their father, who had given up the law shortly after he married in order to paint, had very little money; their mother, who had been a pretty, indulged, Sligo girl, and had expected to be comfortable, was disappointed. She gave birth to six ...”

“... 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 ...”