“... 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 ...”

“... theatrical, for it inescapably carries a memory of Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’. However, as Elizabeth Story Donno points out in her edition of Marvell, Milton uses the word in his 1642 An Apology for Smectymnus: ‘it has no rubric to be sung in an antic cope upon the stage of a high altar.’ The phrase denotes a ‘grotesque ecclesiastical ...”

“... appear works that are certainly not by Rochester, because they are known to be by other people, by Elizabeth Rochester, Sir George Etherege, Sir Carr Scroope and John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave. Well-known poems turn up under the rubric ‘Writings for the theatre’ even when no evidence of a theatrical intent can be adduced; thus the fragment in ...”

“... the rude irruption of European adventurers into the New World. In the royal charter that Queen Elizabeth conferred on Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583, she granted him full power over the soil of ‘those large and ample countreys [that] extended Northward from the cape of Florida … to dispose thereof, of every part thereof in fee simple or ...”

“... and Shuttle may stand as the most remarkable lasting poetic union since that of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning more than a century earlier. Roberts’s biography, for all its readiness to read Redgrove’s life in terms of the Oedipus complex, does allow its subject a nuanced complexity. It is shrewd, well researched and impressively fair. If ...”

“... of Kingston in 1773. His widow was a lady better known to 18th-century gossip by her maiden name, Elizabeth Chudleigh. A generation earlier she had titillated the beau monde at a costume ball at Ranelagh Gardens: she was dressed as Iphigenia, but – if numerous popular prints are to be believed – her Ancient Greek costume consisted of little more than a ...”