“... pages – the stellar cast includes Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola and a hideously tailored 1925 shit-coloured overcoat ...”

“... novelists: Kingsley Amis and Georges Simenon. When Amis’s second wife and fellow novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, saw him, at eleven o’clock on the morning he was due to lunch at Buckingham Palace, standing in the garden punishing an enormous whisky, she said, ‘Bunny, do you have to have a drink?’ He replied (and it was a reply that would have ...”

“... in Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (first produced in 1962, filmed with Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in 1966), referring to a line spoken by Bette Davis in King Vidor’s 1949 film Beyond the Forest, and one man’s sexual desire for another? How is it that an Australian readership in 2000 can be expected to pick up these distant ...”

“... relationship was finally put under intolerable strain when Amis started an affair with the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard. Almost immediately, this affair threatened to be different from its innumerable predecessors because Kingsley fell passionately in love with Jane. Hilly finally walked out on him; he and Jane set up together, marrying in 1965. This seems to ...”

“... juxtapositions reflect the changes and instabilities of the culture itself. Someone born under Elizabeth might, just possibly, have lived into Anne’s reign. The Restoration writer looks back to Donne and forward to Defoe. There is a gulf between, say, Marvell’s ‘green’ poems and his political verses, and some of the first may be contemporary with ...”

“... The talents of the party know better – senators like Sherrod Brown and Sheldon Whitehouse, Elizabeth Warren and Chris Murphy – but many others appear not to realise how much they have surrendered. ‘A majority,’ Lincoln said in his first inaugural address, ‘held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily ...”

“... 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 ...”