“... is summoned out to Pasadena by a prospective client, the brutally dominating if falsely genial Mrs Elizabeth Bright Murdock, who instructs him to find a rare gold coin missing from her late second husband’s collection of Americana. She assumes that her detested ex-daughter-in-law has stolen it. In fact, the thief is her weak and vain son, Leslie, who has ...”

“... world’s religions, from Ignatius Loyola to Julia Roberts in her ridiculous ashram in the film of Elizabeth Gilbert’s yogatastic self-fest, Eat, Pray, Love. It seems to me that the knockabout bit about TV golf doesn’t quite cover up a sentimentality, a bit of an idealisation of both IRS employees and your average yogic guru, the latter of whom is probably ...”

“... a weight of woes’. One of Barbauld’s favourite books as a young woman, McCarthy tells us, was Elizabeth Carter’s translation of the slave-philosopher Epictetus, from which one lesson to be drawn was that superiority could come from smiling your way through bad trouble. When his cruel master tortured him, as Carter told the story in her ...”

“... philanthropists and reformers – Cavell is there, and so are Queens Victoria and Alexandra, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Angela Burdett-Coutts. St Joan’s International Alliance, a Catholic body that was founded by suffragettes and is recognised today by both the Vatican and the UN, celebrated its centenary in 2011, and still distinguishes itself by ...”

“... We agree with the submission received from two well-placed observers – Sir Michael Wood and Elizabeth Wilmshurst – that ‘one of the great strengths of UK foreign policy is the United Kingdom’s reputation for its strong commitment to the rule of law in international affairs,’ including ‘its compliance with its international obligations and its ...”

“... nation. The rocklike reflectiveness of Ursula Le Guin and the ‘deep subjectivity’ of Elizabeth Bishop are evoked with a real warmth. When Bloom considers a poem at length, as he does Marianne Moore’s extraordinary poem ‘Marriage’, he often takes you places you never thought you might go. But these chapters can display the anxiety of someone ...”

“... and then Michael Bloomberg, who was in any case only running to thwart the socialist Sanders. Elizabeth Warren, briefly a front runner, held on through Super Tuesday, though by January her campaign had cratered and a desperate attempt to paint Sanders as sexist did nothing to revive it. The centrist fix was in. At the funeral of the civil rights icon John ...”

“... have English as a second language, but the names they suggest for the story are always similar: Elizabeth, Henry, Jack. You can only be a hero, we have told children, if you have that kind of name: names licked clean by kings and queens. One of the highest compliments in Kipling’s writing is: ‘You’re a white man.’ That is changing now, albeit ...”

“... form, when it came to beggaring explanation, well before she embarked on Wuthering Heights. While Elizabeth Gaskell was researching her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), someone lent her a ‘most extraordinary’ packet containing an ‘immense amount of manuscript’ written in a hand impossible to decipher without the aid of a magnifying glass. These ...”

“... power and endurance, staring at the cover of some magazine bearing a picture of the Princess Elizabeth, then I suppose about sixteen. Suddenly he gave a sort of roaring moan and plunged his face into the breasts of that image, trembling with genuine or simulated lust. Nobody smiled, though Wykehamist eyebrows may have twitched. I could see that men in ...”

“... Among the people who almost certainly took comfort from the tone of the national discussion of events in Cleveland in the summer of 1987 were three middle-aged men from a housing estate in Congleton, Cheshire. As emerged in their trials earlier this year, these men had repeatedly been making sexual assaults of the most extreme sort on very young members of their families, sometimes in a spirit of revolting cruelty ...”

“... transitory, confused, insipid, banal. Dickens and Thackeray and Proust, Scott Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bowen and Anthony Powell – they are all packed with lunches and dinners, balls and parties, which one would much rather not have been at, but which art has contrived to make glorious for us by proxy. Unfair to compare diaries with this? No, because ...”

“... Churchill, even allies with cordial appreciation, and were so harmless that the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, were allowed to slip out around 11 p.m. to mix with the crowd around Buckingham Palace. (Margaret recalled that ‘everyone was knocking off each other’s hats and we knocked off some too.’) Restrained elation was followed after VE Day ...”

“... tell us that on 29 May 1953, three days before the coronation of our present beleaguered Queen Elizabeth II, Edmund (later Sir Edmund) Hillary and Namgyal Wangdi, a devoutly Buddhist Sherpa, or poorly-paid professional climber, known by his spiritual title, Tenzing Norgay (‘fortunate follower of religion’), stood on the summit that Mallory and Irvine ...”

“... She stands in the mirror and turns; someone is watching over her shoulder.Engel’s contemporary Elizabeth Hardwick has something to say about this form of continuation in a story called ‘Cross-Town’:And out of the index cards and the coughing tapes your biography will be preserved and in this, having caught the public eye, you will be trapped in the ...”