“... eyes; the typist and the house agent’s clerk together ‘make a welcome of indifference’; Elizabeth and Leicester are as directionless on the water as the three ruined typists, all sold, all expecting ‘nothing’. The electricity of human feeling moves through the poem like the thunder speaking or the ‘flash of lightning’, but the words in the ...”

“... Emma Bovary, looking longingly at Paris as the escape from the provincialism of Egdon Heath. Elizabeth, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, occasionally lapses into dialect, ‘those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel’, Hardy remarks. Corrected speech is one of the things that sets Tess apart from her impoverished family. Hardy’s heroes and ...”

“... prosperity and prestige. It appears to have been the first of his plays to be acted before Queen Elizabeth, and it was later revived for James after Shakespeare’s company had been adopted as the King’s Men. It has usually been read as an ostentatiously effortless display of how a degree-less provincial could match university-educated courtly playwrights ...”

“... the point-to-point, the open garden scheme, the charity fête. During the war, the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret had worn them to review the Girl Guides and launch messenger pigeons. Ilia knew none of this when her narrow foot was measured – size five and a half, but the left slightly longer than the right – though she understood that she would no ...”

“... the reflective, or, more recently, the resignedly, knowingly, sceptically witty, the world’s Elizabeth Bennets. The word ‘enthusiasm’ was borrowed from the Greek in the 17th century as a term of abuse for those Christians who were seen as intoxicated by personal revelations of the divine – who were, in other words, too passionate. We have come far ...”

“... There is great comic potential in clothes. Woolf’s contemporary and acquaintance Edmée Elizabeth Dashwood wrote under the name of E.M. Delafield in the feminist magazine Time and Tide. From 1930 her column, ‘The Diary of a Provincial Lady’, was a popular feature, written in a persona set at a finely judged acute angle to her own life and ...”

“... followed, his was still the third most cited name in the American press, behind Ronald Reagan and Elizabeth Taylor. He went on to advise presidents of all stripes, commanded huge fees on Wall Street, was lionised in China and feted by publishers. This has continued into his late nineties. Kissinger has always liked to draw a historical parallel from the first ...”

“... in DIY self-pickling. Compared with Highsmith in her seventies, her fellow drunk-dyke genius Elizabeth Bishop looked like a fresh-blooming flower in her later years – a regular Goop-enhanced Gwyneth.Then there was the compulsive sexual promiscuity – a festival of glut, recrimination and endlessly renewed licentious squalor (I almost wrote ...”

“... woman who had been offered a low-paying but coveted position at the New York Review of Books by Elizabeth Hardwick. Her therapist told her she wouldn’t be able to afford therapy if she accepted the job, ‘and I would therefore wind up on the street, a drug-addicted prostitute.’ Terrified, she turned down the offer.But it was the warping of the ...”

“... of Rossetti’s best paintings with quite unfeigned reverence: Beata Beatrix, a rapt portrait of Elizabeth Siddall, is acclaimed as ‘the most purely spiritual and devotional work of European art since the fall of the Byzantine Empire’. More remarkable still, Waugh found in Rossetti a dark predicament which sounded rather close to home: ‘the baffled and ...”

“... Rich’s girlfriend like? When was somebody ever going to spill the beans on Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen?Was there some way, I wonder now, that she wanted me to absolve her? Was the fact that she never mentioned, on any of the occasions we talked, her equally prominent female companion – they lived in the same Manhattan building – a sign of ...”

“... Asked the Wrong Questions about Brittney Griner’ (Time); ‘Ghislaine Maxwell, Elizabeth Holmes and Me’ (Free Press). She sympathised with both Johnny Depp and Amber Heard over the way they were being tried in the court of public opinion. She also wrote well-researched and convincing pieces about defendants most people hadn’t heard ...”

“... a conventional education, at Gakushuin, Japan’s grandest school; among his English tutors was Elizabeth Vining, an American Quaker, who nicknamed him ‘Jimmy’. ‘His interests in those days were almost entirely confined to fish,’ she wrote later, ‘and I felt they needed broadening.’ The influence of this American pacifist on the young prince was ...”

“... The only Democratic leaders who are known to many Americans are Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and their combined age is 220. How did that happen? The Clinton-Obama dollar tree cast a shade for a quarter-century in which smaller political fortunes have struggled even to breathe. Meanwhile, the Democrats remain in denial about the charm of ...”

“... man in his life. Maugham eventually married Syrie for the child’s sake – their daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1915 – but he continued to see Haxton. Gossip proliferated. Maugham, it was said, had taken to hiding behind the sofa whenever his ‘coarse and irritating’ wife was at home. Fanciful tales about the exotic arrangements required to ...”