“... 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 ...”

“... died of typhoid at the age of 18. It even had its lost princess when, in the next year, his sister Elizabeth, afterwards known as the Queen of Hearts, married Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, and disappeared into a long and fairly inglorious future. Both events linger on in the shadowy background to Shakespeare’s very late play The Two Noble Kinsmen. This ...”

“... a still happier outcome must have been apparent (‘she rounds apace’), for their daughter Elizabeth was born in February 1608, less than nine months after the wedding. Hall was from a Bedfordshire family of good standing and had studied at Cambridge. Over the years he built up an extensive practice in the Midlands (though he was not a member of the ...”

“... Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and T.E. Lawrence, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf – this is just a small sampling. Basically, he read his way through the Marylebone public library. He periodically put this marathon on hold to sprint through examinations. What on earth was he doing? Fending off the boredom ...”

“... to construct an artificial relationship of confidence between the parties. Within a few weeks, Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, the president of the Family Division, basing herself in part on our decision, granted worldwide injunctions to prevent the tabloid press from carrying out its threats to expose the identities and whereabouts of the two boys who had killed ...”

“... was the subject of an important article some years ago by one of the contributors to this volume, Elizabeth Carney. Badian, however, in his article on conspiracies, barely seems to have noticed. So little have his opinions changed since he first started working on the subject over forty years ago, that he is able to quote his former self approvingly on more ...”

“... is likely that some of them were part of the Shrovetide festivities around the wedding of Princess Elizabeth (the future ‘Winter Queen’) to the Elector Palatine on 14 February 1613. The majority of the plays are comedies or tragicomedies. Cardenio, judging from the Cervantes source and the Theobald adaptation, was a tragicomedy – a suitable ...”

“... sensitivity to people, and because of the sense of excitement he brought to everything he did’. Elizabeth Jane Howard, who had a brief affair with him, called him ‘a noble little goblin’. She wrote after his death that he was ‘entirely brave; had courage on every level, physical, moral and spiritual … His capacity for indignation – that invaluable ...”

“... poets: Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop and Theodore Roethke. The last two were more peripheral, both less overtly confessional, especially Bishop, and not so much on the scene, New York or Ivy League (though Bishop turned up briefly, and memorably, at Harvard). Their work has stood up ...”

“... when the rams achieve a brief, even a Roman dignity, haughty, disdainful and looking not unlike Elizabeth I. We have a narrow strip of front garden and at the first sound of the approaching flock my father used to rush out flapping his apron and shouting his head off to protect his precious plants.13 April. Rereading Portnoy’s Complaint I’m not ...”

“... there is a fractured, banally proverbial quality to much of his dialogue which is more than just Elizabeth Bowen in demotic. I would like to be able to say, in the approved manner, that this biography has led me to ‘reread’ a good deal of Pritchett, but I have to confess that I have largely been reading him for the first time, culpably so in the case of ...”