“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Jack wrote in the ‘Unbelievable!’ issue of Granta dedicated in part to Diana’s death. For Elizabeth Wilson, in ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Diana’ in New Left Review, Diana’s mythic status put paid to any feminist component of her story (as if the two were incompatible). The Left is the last bastion of a form of reason dangerously discredited in ...”

“... Wales being no stranger to hopefulness of that sort either. The King and Queen, with Princess Elizabeth, sailed out for the Coronation Naval Review in May 1937. Commander T. Woodroffe made a live radio broadcast from the event, which was much listened to, and much remembered, for relaying this, the last of the grand naval spectacles before the war. It is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it was a peculiarly expressive material record, one step closer than the proximity that had struck Elizabeth Barrett Browning when she wrote, after seeing a daguerreotype: ‘It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases – but the association, and the sense of nearness involved in the thing.’ So much of early photography seemed like a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”