“... Quincey wrote about loss, including the loss when he was six years old of his beloved older sister Elizabeth, an event which he considered the defining experience of his life, leaves us on the outside: the writing is like beautifully worked bone with no marrow. De Quincey​ ’s extensive writings about himself – the Confessions, Suspiria, the ...”

“... her three sisters were born into an upper-middle-class London family: her father (whose sister, Elizabeth, became Lady Longford; Antonia Fraser is Harman’s cousin) was a doctor and her mother had qualified as a barrister, though she gave up work when she had children. Their four daughters were to be educated but marriageable; not too submissive or too ...”

“... cooked and ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background’, followed by a plain grilled ...”

“... man! Then again, I’m of the school that thinks teachers should be weird and sort of hate you. Elizabeth Bishop comes to class, her eczema is very bad that day, she reads your poem and closes her eyes.Still, it sheds light. ‘Sparrow’, a third-person story from Liberation Day that is lovely on the first read and a little condescending on the second, now ...”

“... comments to question the representativeness of her experience. They’d been taught the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot in the 1980s! Could things be as bad as all that? ‘Probably not,’ someone called Brian replied.To suggest that a culture of sexism might be disproved by the presence of a few women who are granted exceptional status ...”

“... newspapers,’ Mervyn Leroy said. Some performers were born stars (Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand), some achieved stardom (Marlene Dietrich, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe), some had stardom thrust upon them (Lana Turner, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck). ‘More ...”

“... California,’ Didion records, ‘equipped with two “good” suits, a box of unanswered mail, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Seduction and Betrayal, Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station, six Judy Blume books and my 11-year-old daughter. The Judy Blume books were along to divert my daughter. The daughter was along to divert me.’By that stage in her young ...”

“... misappropriating $8.6 billion of clients’ money or of the scam run by ex-Stanford student Elizabeth Holmes, who raised $700 million for Theranos, a company whose sole product was a medical technology that didn’t exist. Holmes, who used to live in a $15 million mansion and fly in a private Theranos jet, is doing time in federal prison for defrauding ...”

“... prescriptive stuff. Berger’s bleat drew a warm seconding letter from the reliably reactionary Elizabeth Jane Howard and her friend Sybille Bedford. If Berger had slyly blamed all the mayhem onto ‘the Rushdie affair’, these two went him one better in the business of culpability. The violence was not the result of some artfully displaced ...”

“... windows. What bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal Theatre was giving a premiere, a ...”

“... he is saved, as Frederick had been saved by the sudden death of his arch-enemy the Empress Elizabeth of Russia. This clutch of a precedent shows an almost pathetic stupidity – and the paranoiac’s ignorance of and separation from the realities of the outside world. Yet Hitler had once been truly a part of that world, and of the German and European ...”

“... are described as having been wiped out, but then they reappear, only to be wiped out again.Queen Elizabeth managed to suppress the humiliating failure of Drake’s Counter-Armada to Coruña and Lisbon in 1589 so brilliantly that for three centuries no Englishman was aware of it – though English losses were far worse than Spanish losses had been the year ...”

“... non-places kept in a persistent vegetative state, like the Gothic mass of the neighbouring Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in Hackney Road, until the right development package comes along. And meanwhile spiders knit their spectral nets. Shivering phantoms stand before empty mirrors in white-tiled washrooms where the taps leak coal ...”

“... who has had plenty of time to think, but it can be indolent to the point of nervelessness. Thus of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet, he remarks: So far as I can see on an exceedingly cloudy day, I wouldn’t say she is particularly gifted as an actress. She seems, rather, to turn things off and on, much as she is told, with perhaps a fair amount of natural ...”

“... and ugly dog-ears stuck on at either end – a foretaste of the disaster inside. By the time Queen Elizabeth inaugurated the Opera House on 20 October 1973, the final cost was A$102 million (then £51 million) of which 75 per cent was spent after Utzon’s departure, often exceeding the lottery income. George Molnar, a lecturer in architecture and a Sydney ...”