“... invert the given limitations of the form, subduing the obtrusive repetition until it is invisible. Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’ is one perfect example. The other is Kipling’s ‘Sestina of the Tramp-Royal’. The strict, cramped, formal demands of the sestina are belied by the unbuttoned dialect and its illusion of relaxation and ...”

“... to have tried to replace her (‘he looked for a surrogate mother in every relationship,’ says Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be ...”

“... executions would promote anti-American sentiment and disrupt the ‘Anglo-American accord’. On Elizabeth II’s first outing after her coronation, she saw a ‘Save the Rosenbergs’ banner draped on the Monument to the Great Fire of London. Two thousand demonstrators in Calcutta protested outside the US embassy; in Paris, tens of thousands marched on the ...”

“... who were willing to risk their lives in a desperate crusade,’ Wisner’s daughter, the historian Elizabeth Hazard, would write, ‘but its policies had subverted the possibility of an early detente with the Soviet Union.’In March 1957, back in Washington, Wisner offered to direct an operation to overthrow President Sukarno of Indonesia. It ended, Anderson ...”

“... instructor for the Coast Guard, and the boy’s first nine years were spent in the port town of Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His mother, Wendy, was descended from two passengers on the Mayflower: Priscilla Mullins, ‘the only single woman of marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony’, and the ship’s cooper, John ...”

“... 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 ...”