“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... power and endurance, staring at the cover of some magazine bearing a picture of the Princess Elizabeth, then I suppose about sixteen. Suddenly he gave a sort of roaring moan and plunged his face into the breasts of that image, trembling with genuine or simulated lust. Nobody smiled, though Wykehamist eyebrows may have twitched. I could see that men in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”