“... discovering Father strangled with a Christmas stocking. Gorey was, however, fond of his cousins, Elizabeth and Eleanor Garvey, and cousinship was perhaps the degree of separation he found most palatable. Cousins often feature in his stories and tend to come off better than parents or siblings. The Garveys’ children remember him treating them exactly as he ...”

“... alone and the comparison of characters with literary and artistic figures: Carson McCullers, Elizabeth Taylor, Romy Schneider, Maigret.Le Cheval blanc d’Uffington deals with an author who has secluded herself on an island to avoid strong sensation, choosing to write about the world instead of experiencing it. ‘For a year, I had incessantly questioned ...”

“... of England’s most disastrous kings’). Roberts tells us with his trademark thump that now Elizabeth II has allowed more than 200,000 pages of the Georgian Archives at Windsor to be published – 85 per cent of them for the first time – ‘it is at last possible to show that every single word quoted above about George III is completely ...”

“... love affair with a younger man who vanishes from her life. Despite her stated influences – Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and, above all, Thomas Bernhard – I thought of no one so much as Proust. As Davis says of his style, ‘to be exhaustive is, of course, an infinite task: more events can always be ...”

“... that they were ‘coloured’ and rang the police, who came and arrested them. ‘Long live Queen Elizabeth! We like your queen!’ one of the men said hopefully. It was no good. They were all taken to prison and then flown back to Pakistan. In those days, it turned out, you were entitled to remain in Britain if you could escape detection for 24 hours. The ...”

“... and regulators may try to ensure that such an infrastructure doesn’t come about. In November, Elizabeth Denham, then the UK’s information commissioner, warned that her office, which has long-standing concerns about the sharing of user data in ad auctions, ‘will not accept proposals based on underlying AdTech concepts that replicate or seek to maintain ...”

“... was unknown. But as Russell Banks points out in the preface to The Hurly Burly, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg had led a campaign on Coppard’s behalf. In the 1970s, he had another revival in the UK after a couple of his stories were adapted for television and Lessing put together a selection. But by the 1980s, in the Dirty ...”

“... hemmed in to the north by hills. The atmosphere was already thickening in Tudor times, as Queen Elizabeth declared herself ‘greatly grieved and annoyed with the taste and smoke of sea-coles’. Then and in the 17th century, industry was blamed; wood-smoke from lime-burning and fumes from coal (‘sea-coal’) burned in breweries, bakeries and glass ...”

“... de La Mare that played a major role in the young Auden’s poetic education and was acclaimed by Elizabeth Bishop as ‘the best anthology I know of’. ‘I wish I were Mr Anon,’ de la Mare once remarked in a letter, ‘unknown, beloved, perennial, ubiquitous, in that very wide shady hat of his and dark dwelling eyes’. While the nonsense verse of Lewis ...”

“... do not worship me,’ she wrote. This was unfortunate for her children, only one of whom, Lucy Elizabeth, could be counted on to respond to her erratic displays of affection. Her favourites were among those, seven of twelve, who had died. For the living children her feeling rarely rose even to affection. They had disliked her, she believed, from ...”

“... from Franklin to Thoreau, from Edgar Allan Poe (‘The Philosophy of Composition’) to Elizabeth Bishop (‘The USA School of Writing’). Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance descends (with a clunk) from Moby-Dick; so does Norman MacLean’s A River Runs through It; but so does Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. The ...”

“... Here the shape of the future is suggested by Reading Herodotus (2007), a study of Book 5 edited by Elizabeth Irwin and Emily Greenwood, where a group of scholars got together, divided up the text and put the resultant findings through the wringer of collective criticism. Everywhere else there is a real embarras de richesses, a dazzling variety of (not seldom ...”

“... cathedral organs were being demolished and the choirs set to singing metrical psalms, but when Elizabeth ascended the throne, she ignored that trajectory, and her own Chapel Royal set a standard of musical elaboration and beauty that the Church of England has never forgotten. Westminster Abbey, across the road from the Palace of Whitehall, was frequently ...”

“... Discussing the possibility that Gissing had an affair with his upper-class benefactress Elizabeth Gaussen, Delany writes: Why were Gissing’s sexual interests always aimed either below or above the social level where he himself lived? He might have suffered much less from loneliness and sexual deprivation if he had chosen women whose status was ...”

“... common, sealed coffins sometimes exploded’ because of it. There is a story that the corpse of Elizabeth I – retained for more than a month before burial – blew up, shattering the wooden coffin and lead sarcophagus in which it was being kept. (The story was itself political dynamite, and her courtiers evidently tried to keep it secret, while Papists ...”