“... more serious business of having fun. Often, on encountering Mew’s children, I’m reminded of Elizabeth Bishop’s affection for a short story she came across in the New York Times, composed by an eight-year-old: ‘I told my little brother when you die you cannot breathe and he did not say a word. He just kept on playing.’The deaths of Mew’s little ...”

“... horrible, and I almost felt that I did not want to go back – till, of course, I remembered Elizabeth Arden, my flat and the Savoy Grill.’ Reading both books in Liberia made me wonder whether hers isn’t the better. Journey without Maps is solemn and erudite; Barbara Greene’s version of the trek is clearer-eyed: ‘I knew perfectly well,’ she ...”

“... the last years of Johnson’s life the household also accommodated Barber’s young English wife, Elizabeth, née Ball, whom he married in 1773, and the first two of their three children. Betsy Barber was a great favourite of Johnson, and even wrung a compliment from Mrs Thrale, who thought her ‘eminently pretty’, though some others – notably Hawkins ...”

“... murders of William the Silent and Henri III and Henri IV of France; the attempt to poison Queen Elizabeth; the numerous plots, in both his kingdoms, on the life of James VI and I – for threats and rumours of regicide to place nations on recurrent high alert. In life and art alike, there was a special frisson to death by poison. In 1612 the death of ...”

“... For Eggers, the very worst thing you could be is a member of a club you didn’t found yourself. Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of the depression memoir Prozac Nation (1994), went to Harvard and wrote for Seventeen magazine, but emphasises how ill-suited she was for such places, and how unimpressed she was by what she saw there. ‘I’d spent all my time in high ...”

“... a bunch of proto-Brexiteers – Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss – slapdashed a manifesto together called Britannia Unchained, the gist of which is that the British have become squalid, lazy gits, getting fat and studying useless subjects like psychology and desiring only to be footballers or pop stars. If we ...”

“... tend to take emphatic pride in their nation’s carriers: the Royal Navy refers to HMS Queen Elizabeth, launched in 2014, as ‘4.5 acres of floating sovereign power’. The US has eleven full-size fleet carriers, more than the rest of the world combined. It wasn’t always so. Japan had ten carriers by 1940 and Japanese admirals pioneered the carrier ...”

“... chewing-gum dispenser) than from the work of his predecessors in art. As it happened, his sister Elizabeth was thought to be the artistic member of the family. She was sent to take painting classes with Edward Hopper, the son of the man who owned the local dry goods store. Joseph preferred to stay at home, immersed in Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers ...”

“... all the claptrap that was explicit by the time Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reached the screen with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. The play and movie were both big successes; Williams lived on them for decades. But the struggle over the third act had been painful, and his friendship with Kazan was never quite the same. He said once that the rewriting ...”

“... gate’. Aldington and H.D. had liked to imagine that their marriage resembled that of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but it’s rare for two poets to have a happy marriage. He tried to justify his actions by reproaching H.D., telling her that what he perceived as her ‘ardour for perfection’ was making her deeply unhappy; he told her that his ...”

“... early pages to the first kind of mystery, specifically those described with cool backhandedness by Elizabeth Bowen when she wrote that ‘the only above-board grown-up children’s stories are detective stories.’ Japanese readers would understand quickly that Tokyo Year Zero concerns a real-life serial killer, as notorious there as Peter Sutcliffe here, but ...”

“... Jane Austen favoured names which give almost nothing away about status or nature (Fanny Price, Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse), but she could in some circumstances use names which suggest meaning: the wild Marianne Dashwood is an early example of a flighty heroine lost in a moral forest, and Mr Knightley, well, he’s not going to be a cad, is he? The ...”

“... like Wollstonecraft, Robinson, Williams, the novelist Amelia Opie and the novelist and dramatist Elizabeth Inchbald. Hays was self-conscious about her looks, never allowed her portrait to be taken, and was punished for the crime of being plain in the macho chit-chat of men she had imagined were her friends. The last section of the book will be the most ...”

“... sharply flavoured work (the Complete Poems are with difficulty bulked up to 240 pages: they make Elizabeth Bishop look lax if not garrulous); for the unusual way time – history – is precipitated in a literary life. ‘Bunting had a knack of being in the thick of things,’ Richard Burton observes in this first proper biography: it feels like a flagrant ...”

“... complaining that ‘news management’ had become ‘news invention’. Even the young Queen Elizabeth was moved to remark to her press secretary: ‘I think the basic dishonesty of the whole thing was a trouble.’ Now, 30 years on, Lance Price, himself a former BBC reporter who then worked as a media adviser to Tony Blair, has brought the story up to ...”