“... Wales; then Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, with whom it is likely he had an affair; and finally Elizabeth Armistead, another former mistress of the prince (Fox eventually married Armistead in secret). Personal happiness offered one compensation for royal opprobrium. Global affairs were another kind of distraction. The fortunes of the Burke family were ...”

“... to charming ingrates. In any event, like a Depression-era mother in a James Cagney film, Elizabeth couldn’t see the bad in her boy. The worse he got, the more she wanted to camouflage him with medals, rosettes and ribbons. The irony is that he treated her as badly as he treated every other woman, flogging Sunninghill, the house she gave him as a ...”

“... liberation over the last 160 years in the US. By that measure Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, Bella Abzug, Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, Del Martin and Harvey Milk were just lowly practitioners of identity politics, which we’ve been told to get over. Shortly after the election ...”

“... trailed around the building by an old white sheepdog and a young black Labrador. Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel about industrial Manchester, begins with the disappearance of Mary’s aunt Esther, who has fallen in love with an army officer and become pregnant by him. When the officer disappears and their daughter falls ill, Esther stops ...”

“... with the less privileged sisters. And yet, the strange thing is how often they haven’t: Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed votes for freedmen; Betty Friedan made the epoch-defining suggestion that middle-class American women should dump the housework on ‘full-time help’. There are so many examples of this sort that it would be funny if it weren’t ...”

“... 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 ...”