“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... my heroines appeared on the back page of the comic I read then, called Girl: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale and Marie Curie mingled with Albert Schweitzer and Davy Crockett; their stirring words were blazoned in balloons, against backdrops of crenellated castles, jungles, battlefields. In the pages of the magazines my mother took, I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Rooney. She who every morning plays a gallant Robert Browning to my late-rising, half-paralytic Elizabeth Barrett – get thee up from thy bed, thou fat lazy kitten-slug, and take that nun’s twat off thy head. Here, I’ve bought thee a clip-on pedometer and thou wilt walk ten thousand steps up and down Wimpole Street today or you’ll never see thy ...”

“... the affection of handsome young men with jewels, gold vessels and the like. The surplus left by Elizabeth turned into a deficit of £600,000, an enormous sum. The king was not alone in finding himself stretched. The availability of credit from the City of London meant that many tracts of land long in the hands of the crown or the nobility were converted ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... capable of becoming mantras of a sophisticated sort, gaining power from repeated contemplation. Elizabeth Hardwick’s ‘coolly composed sentences’, for instance, gave Dillon something to hang on to, ‘but there was enough about them of intentional disarray that I felt as though in her essayism she understood extremes.’ He makes a meal of one ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in part, for Chapman’s Achilles, was executed in 1601 after his ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth I; Henry, Prince of Wales, the dedicatee of the Odyssey, died in 1612 at the age of 18. Chapman kept plugging away. The extended genesis of Chapman’s Homer is one of its defining and most frequently neglected features. Many modern translations try to ...”