“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or ‘God’s wounds’ or ‘bastard’ depends on who you say it to and why – as Queen Elizabeth I’s lord deputy in Ireland Sir John Perrot discovered when his secretary told on him for saying ‘God’s wounds, this it is to serve a base bastard pissing kitchen woman.’ Oaths can carry their potential to hurt or shock into normal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... us.’ The author and scholar Catherine Talbot, writing to the poet and translator of Epictetus, Elizabeth Carter (and not, as Martin has it, the other way round), said of a piece of Johnson’s anonymous writing: ‘I discern Mr Johnson … as evidently as if I saw him through the keyhole with the pen in his hand.’ Just as his singularity enables ...”

“... by the petite bourgeoisie (Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot)? I don’t think, as Carey does, that Elizabeth Bowen ‘goes beyond’ Henry James (whom Carey doesn’t seem to like) in her ability to depict inner thought and feeling, and I am unable to make sense of his claim that Lucky Jim represents ‘one of the first attempts in English to describe women ...”

“... that was made of a certain novel by me’ – i.e. The Ice Storm. He’s the male counterpart to Elizabeth Wurtzel, the overachieving underachiever who wowed readers with her daredevil debauchery in Prozac Nation and then would throw in, almost as an afterthought, being accepted at Harvard or selling a piece to Rolling Stone. Despite Wurtzel’s image as an ...”

“... tolerance of religious difference, and discussing freedom and justice. ‘This proposal is less Elizabeth I and Winston Churchill than Barney the Dinosaur meets the Commission for Racial Equality,’ the Times snorted. ‘Whatever Britishness may be, it is surely not the mush that is now being proposed.’ All that one can say is that the mush spoken about ...”

“... Gaggia’s wonderful coffee machine; we sniff the first whiffs of garlic and olive oil from Elizabeth David’s Book of Mediterranean Food; we hear the first chords of Bill Haley and the Comets. We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy ...”

“... Girls provides many instances of women who found a stronger sense of themselves in self-denial. Elizabeth Pinnance, a rug-weaver from Huddersfield, was another who did time in Holloway in 1907. On the sitting-room wall of her granddaughter’s neat suburban home, an illuminated testimonial presented to her by Mrs Pankhurst is still proudly displayed, with ...”

“... Those men wanted to restore what they took to have been the political harmony of the reign of Elizabeth I. There was, Trevor-Roper thought, no basic divide of political theory between king and Parliament, both of whom called for a ‘limited’ or ‘mixed monarchy’. The division between Roundheads and Cavaliers was the cause, not a consequence, of the ...”