“... mass of richest spices, putrified into a dunghill’), and advised Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett and Alfred Tennyson to give up poetry and write prose instead. Not only his contemporaries fell short. Milton was guilty of unsystematic reasoning (‘It is quite clear that he never studied mathematics very deeply, or political economy – or ...”

“... interesting connection comes via the marriage, in the early 1570s, of his older brother William to Elizabeth Stafford. She was the sister of Sir Edward Stafford, who later became English Ambassador in France. Here is a hitherto unknown dimension to Thomas Drury: he is a brother-in-law of that most conspiratorial of ambassadors, whose house in Paris was a ...”

“... surveyed by drones, or hard-hat visionaries in helicopters, from heights where even the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park looks great, is only there to be explained, improved, colonised and captured. So? So? So what?So when I think I’m moving across a city of memories, where I have lived and worked for fifty years, I find that, very soon, I lose the markers ...”

“... as Jenny Diski noted in What I Don’t Know about Animals (2010). People need to eat, and even Elizabeth Costello carried a leather handbag, and anyway, veggiebragging is boring and self-obsessed. Worse than that, it’s sentimental – like pro-Life-ism, with which Haraway draws a parallel – and a cover for cruelty (forcing a woman to give birth to a ...”

“... metropolitan area and on the south coast.Every time I take the long escalator down to the Elizabeth Line, or contemplate the implications of our compulsive burrowing into the radiant future promised by developers, I wonder about the psychic damage being inflicted on London as a living organism. ‘Intercept, store and ultimately transfer’ is the ...”

“... burden on common definitions. But even here acute problems arise. The England of Edward I and of Elizabeth I was one country: but was it really the same kind of society, within the terms of the taxonomy itself, when villeinage had disappeared between the two? Sung China was a contemporary of Norman Sicily, and Runciman judges them absolutist alike. But where ...”

“... biography. Zirker’s volume includes seven works, one of which, ‘A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning’ (1753), concerns the well-known case which provided the basis for Josephine Tey’s novel The Franchise Affair. The Covent-Garden Journal (1752) is the last of Fielding’s major works of journalism, and perhaps the most interesting to ...”

“... is to a 17th-century Savile and his son and daughter-in-law, done by Maximilian Colt who sculpted Elizabeth I’s monument in Westminster Abbey. Elsewhere in the church are two faceless reclining figures and, acting as corbels, some huge grotesque stone heads. I don’t take much notice of these but it turns out that these carvings are why the church is ...”

“... argues –is both remembering lines he wrote perhaps ten years earlier in the reign of Elizabeth, and also recalling performances by the actors who spoke his lines. He seems to be drawing on nature for his conceit, but equally he is drawing on the created nature of his own art. The young man is a flawed, brilliant royal actor, and he is also an ...”

“... the BBC for nearly forty years and can still be heard in the archives introducing young Princess Elizabeth as she delivers her wartime address to the children of Britain. ‘Goodnight children, everywhere,’ was Uncle Mac’s catchprase. Though Gamlin’s activities were under wraps until now, there have long been rumours about McCulloch. He was given the ...”

“... prejudice?), and then ‘the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil’, an image and a phrase Elizabeth Bishop might not have disdained, with its quiet metaphorical swell. The rhythms and play of sounds, the subtle presence of things remembered in things seen, convey a genius for observation that one doesn’t think of as Forsterian. The Bishop-like ...”

“... In January 1945, as she was preparing her collection North & South for publication, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her publishers to say she was worried that she had written nothing about the war: The fact that none of these poems deal directly with the war, at a time when so much war poetry is being published, will, I am afraid, leave me open to reproach ...”

“... breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. Elizabeth Bishop, ‘At the Fishhouses’ ‘Like what we imagine knowledge to be’. There are many ways of imagining knowledge – this is a proposition not likely to provoke much dispute. But how about this one? There are many ways in which the imagination ...”

“... more than one cultural tradition flowing into the river of same-sex unions in the British Isles. Elizabeth Brown in the Traditio volume suggests that the distribution of wed-brothers in (the chronicles of) Norman lands may imply a powerful Scandinavian tradition. Brent Shaw cites an account of Celtic homosexual marriage, overlooked by Boswell, preserved by ...”

“... and theory: Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Jonathan Goldberg, Judith Fetterley, Jean Schwind, Elizabeth Ammons. Acocella takes no prisoners. She is queen of the devastating citation, and more than happy to let the jargon-mad professors hang themselves. Thus poor Robert Nelson, author of a 1988 book on the novelist, gets mercilessly dinged for writing ...”