“... 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 ...”

“... of May. British politicians were persuaded to spend £7.6 billion on the new vessels, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, despite having too few planes with which to equip them and only one ageing store ship to supply them. The military leadership also pushed for the Royal Navy to form ‘Littoral Strike Groups’ for international ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 witchcraft are far differing sciences,’ an idea with a long pedigree in the English state. Elizabeth I made witchcraft a felony in 1563, yet employed Dr John Dee as court magician. Not everyone agreed with the distinction. Exasperated Protestant clerics held that magic and witchcraft were the same, insisting even that village white witches were worse ...”

“... on Havana cigars. Feminist art historians have often found her exasperating. As in the case of Elizabeth Butler, the pre-eminent battle painter of Victorian Britain, Bonheur’s subjects don’t easily lend themselves to gendered analysis. Linda Nochlin deplored Bonheur’s indecision in both asserting and shunning her femininity (Nochlin called it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... century been denied proper access to the political process: but from Katherine Philips through Elizabeth Barrett Browning to the present day, many women poets have commented on politics, and with only one British woman poet Paulin’s anthology is sadly defective here. The Romantic section would have been enlivened by Annabella Plumptre’s ...”

“... was at his suggestion that three unknown designers were brought in to do the costumes. These were Elizabeth Montgomery and her two partners Margaret and Sophia Harris, the Motleys, who specialised in producing stunning effects with the cheapest materials. The OUDS Romeo and Juliet entranced all who saw it and was the trial run for the triumphant version ...”

“... like a man without a skin. Unswerving truth is all very well in exemplary radical fiction. In Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art the noble young Henry, brought up in uncivilised Africa, entertainingly floors his clerical uncle and pliant cousin by regularly subjecting their conversation to a Socratic dialectic. In real life, Mrs Inchbald’s triumphs ...”