“... of the habitués were loners, fighting for life, or fighting against it. ‘It wasn’t done,’ Elizabeth Smart said, ‘to go on too much about members’ suicides – not gloomily, anyhow. It spoiled the moment.’Droll jokes were the signature style, and Muriel must have been pretty good, because everybody, not least the barmen, spoke exactly like ...”

“... initiatives and squatters. Immigrant communities created festivals and cultural institutions: Elizabeth Buettner sensitively recovers Naseem Khan’s decades of effective and joyful activism. Gay enclaves emerged in London, Manchester and Bristol and mobilised to defend themselves when Aids hit. In the late 1970s, feminist ‘Reclaim the Night’ marches ...”

“... the Poem appears in the Library of America, alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bishop, Herman Melville and Ursula Le Guin. That’s an elevated podium. Does it belong there? Will it last? Literary criticism typically doesn’t have a long shelf life, and that’s in part because it is or ought to be volatile and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... written a poem about, say, catching an old fish and staring at it and then just letting it go? As Elizabeth Bishop told Robert Lowell, ‘I find I’m really a minor female ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... before American audiences in a student touring production or that, as a child, she came second to Elizabeth Taylor for the lead role in National Velvet. When that gift for performance is combined with profound democratic convictions – with the belief, which she surely has, that she speaks for a common good above the interests of party or class – the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... research materials, including the manuscripts of all his novels from Dusklands (1974) to Elizabeth Costello (2003). Remarkably, ‘the manuscript entries and revisions are meticulously dated,’ and include discussions and criticisms of the work’s progress. It is as if, from the start, Coetzee had always thought of the creative process as something ...”

“... woven from yarn he had spun as a wedding present for Mountbatten’s nephew Philip and Princess Elizabeth (this piece too still in the royal collection). By comparison with the 1858 proclamation, the Proclamation of Victoria as empress of India was a botch. Disraeli mishandled the Royal Titles Bill in Parliament so badly that he nearly lost it. In ...”

“... 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 ...”