“... A few years back, when the dead-windowed block at the foot of the park was still the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children, a giant Mickey Mouse was choppered in to put the frighteners on the sick kids. And also to act, if only we had recognised it, as a premature ambassador for the coming corporate bonanza. The soft-spoken Californian rodent was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the Light Brigade, Cecil was a frail woman with a tiny bird-like skull, looking more like Elizabeth I (in later life) than Edith Sitwell ever did (and minus her sheet metal earrings). Irish, she had a Firbankian wit and a lovely turn of phrase. ‘Do you know the Atlantic at all?’ she once asked me and I put the line into Habeas Corpus and got a big ...”

“... and then to Edinburgh, where she met Cumming’s father – she changed her name from Betty to Elizabeth, a rejection of the identity she had been given.But this adoption story was still not quite the truth about the Elston family. Betty uncovered the real story of her childhood by looking at a photograph. As a teenager, she needed to have an official ...”

“... a big heart, as his work for Aids charities makes clear. Such work put him in closer contact with Elizabeth Taylor.She was incredibly kind … although you had to watch your jewellery around her. She was obsessed. If you were wearing something she liked the look of, she’d somehow just charm you into giving it to her; you would walk into her dressing room ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to some other occasion to reflect on what this leap consisted in.’ Or there’s the opening of Elizabeth Costello (2003):There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems ...”

“... states to exclude women with no penalty at all. ‘If that word “male” be inserted,’ Elizabeth Cady Stanton warned, ‘it will take us a century at least to get it out.’These days, the Fourteenth Amendment tends to be unequivocally celebrated, with little or no awareness of its compromises. When it was drawn up, however, some reformers ...”

“... rural leaders, deliver services and win respect. The quality of journalists in Iraq has been high: Elizabeth Rubin for the New York Times Magazine and the New Republic, George Packer for the New Yorker, Rory McCarthy for the Guardian and James Astill for the Economist have produced great pieces. But even the most energetic analysts cannot move ...”

“... years’ total immersion in the heady whirlpool of Paris artistic life. French and provincial as Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking – and just as much intended for publication. This ineradicable quality of the fraud, the fake, of the unrepentant self-publicist, is one of the things about Colette I respect most, indeed, revere. Michèle Sarde’s ...”

“... is nothing on the House of Commons in the 1640s, on which Hexter’s best work was written, though Elizabeth Read Foster analyses ‘The Journal of the House of Lords for the Long Parliament’. There is nothing on Sir Thomas More. Few of the contributors are former pupils. The five most distinguished are neither pupils nor colleagues nor even Americans. A ...”

“... took his own measure wryly. ‘To bee kind is very easy,’ he wrote to his long-suffering wife, Elizabeth, in 1679. ‘I say nott this to putt you in mind of being kind to mee … but to show that I myself have a sence of what the methods of my Life seeme soe utterly to contradict.’ To say more was impossible: ‘I must not bee too wise about my own ...”

“... took a job as a social worker and continued to write, eventually showing Second-Class Citizen to Elizabeth Stevens of Curtis Brown, who had the good idea of sending it to Allison and Busby, run by Margaret Busby, the UK’s first Black woman publisher. ‘Here was a group of people around my age who were talking of what they were going to do in the literary ...”

“... George Sturt, J.A. Baker, James Agee, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Knut Hamsun and Elizabeth Smart. But I’m not being entirely fair. For one of these writers has already been singled out for extensive analysis.It’s an odd choice. Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) is a book Davis would have been unlikely to come across, she says, let ...”