“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of writers in Athens in 1962, the poet James Merrill and the British novelists Robert Liddell, Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym, she fled town as soon as she could, muttering that she wasn’t made for this kind of thing. She seems to have cut a formidable figure. ‘Mary Renault arrived all in gold lamé. Miss Pym (a failure) in her simple ...”

“... tried to coax informal revelations out of Roosevelt over lunch. He flirted with Ginger Rogers and Elizabeth Arden. He wrote The Gremlins (1943), about a pilot, for Walt Disney, but the film was never made. He slept with starlets – and then, in 1953, he married one. Patricia Neal, co-star with Ronald Reagan in The Hasty Heart and former lover of Gary ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... called ‘one of the best documented attacks of flatulence in history’) to sex.He had married Elizabeth de St Michel when he was 22 years old; she was 14, young even by the standard of the time. We don’t know how they met. Her father was French, and she had grown up in Paris and Devon. She was a Protestant, though when she was angry at her husband she ...”

“... knew, she was in the bedroom of a flat in a Sunderland skyscraper with Vena and Vena’s mother, Elizabeth, holding a tumbler of whisky. She heard shouts of ‘Oh my God, oh my God. They’ve found the bairn.’ Then Vena turned to Elizabeth, and said: ‘She’s dead.’In the years that followed Sharon lived on a diet of ...”

“... fearful realisation that your children have minds of their own. The Bird’s Nest (1954) is about Elizabeth Richmond, who is being treated for multiple personality disorder. The novel, which is based on a case study from 1906, shares an interest in psychoanalysis with Hangsaman, and has similar weaknesses – too much spelling out, principally. ...”

“... in Ireland as everywhere else, and not just in the Ascendancy circles in which Beckett grew up. Elizabeth Bowen records that when her house was temporarily taken over in 1922 by the young soldiers of the IRA they avidly seized from the shelves the thin scarlet Kipling volumes and seemed to find themselves and their aspirations given substance and colour in ...”

“... Jonathan Meades (‘Robin behaved badly before anyone else did’), Ian Penman, John Williams, Elizabeth Young – they’ve all done him. And been stretchered back to the cab. A Cook tribute is the contemporary equivalent to the apprentice’s passing-out ceremony. In both cases, you’re likely to end up legless in a Clerkenwell dustbin. The great ...”

“... Weldon, Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Dwight Bolinger, Elizabeth Traugott and many more). What is revealing is how the panel’s response to certain types of usage has changed between 1969, the date of the first survey, and 1988. Take, for example, one of Amis’s favourite bête noires, the evolution of words from ...”