“... appearance – was pleased when John Holms told her she looked like ‘a something Queen Elizabeth’. The missing adjective was ‘Surbiton’, which she would not have liked, though she was capable of accepting far crueller truths about herself than most people could dream up for her. She didn’t doubt the doctor who told her she had the nature of ...”

“... businesslike and not censorious. An exceptional case which drew a stronger reaction was that of Elizabeth Elless, who was taken violently ill and died when only two days from full term. Turner saw there would have to be an autopsy, arranged it and attended it; his unemotional entry records the shape of the incision the surgeon made in the abdomen, a large ...”

“... Harold Nicolson’s delightful vignettes Some People, Lytton Strachey’s psychological melodrama Elizabeth and Essex and A.J.A. Symons’s detective mystery. The Quest for Corvo – all designed to find more imaginative and adventurous ways of writing non-fiction. What these authors were trying to do was to release biography from the mechanical processes of ...”

“... Castle. They lived in a rented cottage and were looked after by a kindly Australian woman called Elizabeth Wiltshire. Spike wrote in his diary: ‘She was like a mother to them.’ End of story. No further reference in the book to Hastings, the cottage or Ms Wiltshire. To be fair to Ms Scudamore, her subject has already creamed off much of the most ...”

“... of David Jones and Eric Ravilious, and John Minton’s decorations for the cookery books of Elizabeth David. Only in the coolest hardware shops or the deepest Habitat basements can one believe that the purpose of kitchen design is functional. In the history of taste, painting is only occasionally important: originality of a profound sort very rarely ...”

“... like a dream roster, an all-time heavenly cricket team. Greene on cinema, Osbert Lancaster on art, Elizabeth Bowen on theatre, William Empson on travel ... and Evelyn Waugh on books. Waugh’s lambasting of the milquetoast Left sounds like mere common sense now, but by making truthfulness of prose his first criterion he achieved a permanently refreshing ...”

“... to which Lowell’s censorious biographers pay too little attention, the words of his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. She said that ‘texts had been his life.’ A tycoon’s widow might equally say, and in the same spirit, that ‘money had been his life.’ The sharpest point that Marjorie Perloff makes is to quote from Ian Hamilton’s biography of ...”

“... past. Maybe, in all that rushing and tumbling, he came across a filling station like the one in Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem, a place where the rows of cans are arranged so that they softly say: Esso-so-so-so to high-strung automobiles. Somebody loves us all. He had found his West at last. Our white caravan took us in the end to Texas, but before that ...”

“... pleasure – more of that ‘heartfelt felicity’ that Emma Woodhouse finds with Mr Knightley, or Elizabeth Bennet with the handsome Darcy – in remaining with one another. The letters from Austen that Cassandra allowed to survive testify to such a primordial bond. Virginia Woolf observed of Austen’s fiction that ‘it is where the power of the man has to ...”

“... of 20th-century lesbian libertinism: witness the tantalising vignettes we have of the young Elizabeth Bishop on Key West, for example, in bed with Billie Holiday; or Natalie Barney, who took her last lover at the age of 80; or Vita Sackville-West, one of whose lovers cherished the marks on her inner thighs left by Vita’s earrings. Carstairs would ...”

“... rather to stop the news getting out. (This was by no means a unique early example of fake news. Elizabeth I squashed the news of the dismal failure of Drake’s expedition to Coruna in 1589, the so-called Counter-Armada, so successfully that not a word of it leaked into English history books for three hundred years.) Cromwell was so shattered by this ...”

“... to a roomful of creative writing students, something on the lines of ‘We’ve been reading Elizabeth Bowen, now think of a house where you were happy, but you no longer live there. Write it!’, they all bent their heads down over their paper and began writing. I couldn’t believe it. When students are tackling a task like that, you can feel the whirr ...”

“... accident – ‘in a fit of absence of mind’, in John Seeley’s indelible mot. The charter that Elizabeth granted the merchant venturers on New Year’s Eve 1600 had a chilling arrogance about it, which was to cast a long shadow. The Company was to enjoy a monopoly on trade with all parts of Asia ‘not in the possession of a Christian Prince’. The queen ...”

“... resources than the diagnosis of a plight. The best of Lear – and his legacy to his admirers (Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery, among others) – owes much to his willingness to turn his life’s abandonments into forms of strange abandon, his ability to shape conjurations of the blithe and the bereft:         Calico Pie         The ...”

“... thirty years ago. Al Gore reached an audience of millions with An Inconvenient Truth. In 2014, Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction warned of the cataclysmic loss of global biodiversity. Around the world, in villages and urban centres, ordinary people are dealing with drought, flood, fire, food shortages, conflict, and the pressures of the largest ...”