“... Rich’s girlfriend like? When was somebody ever going to spill the beans on Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen?Was there some way, I wonder now, that she wanted me to absolve her? Was the fact that she never mentioned, on any of the occasions we talked, her equally prominent female companion – they lived in the same Manhattan building – a sign of ...”

“... died of typhoid at the age of 18. It even had its lost princess when, in the next year, his sister Elizabeth, afterwards known as the Queen of Hearts, married Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, and disappeared into a long and fairly inglorious future. Both events linger on in the shadowy background to Shakespeare’s very late play The Two Noble Kinsmen. This ...”

“... Emma Bovary, looking longingly at Paris as the escape from the provincialism of Egdon Heath. Elizabeth, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, occasionally lapses into dialect, ‘those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel’, Hardy remarks. Corrected speech is one of the things that sets Tess apart from her impoverished family. Hardy’s heroes and ...”

“... to construct an artificial relationship of confidence between the parties. Within a few weeks, Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, the president of the Family Division, basing herself in part on our decision, granted worldwide injunctions to prevent the tabloid press from carrying out its threats to expose the identities and whereabouts of the two boys who had killed ...”

“... of Rossetti’s best paintings with quite unfeigned reverence: Beata Beatrix, a rapt portrait of Elizabeth Siddall, is acclaimed as ‘the most purely spiritual and devotional work of European art since the fall of the Byzantine Empire’. More remarkable still, Waugh found in Rossetti a dark predicament which sounded rather close to home: ‘the baffled and ...”

“... woman who had been offered a low-paying but coveted position at the New York Review of Books by Elizabeth Hardwick. Her therapist told her she wouldn’t be able to afford therapy if she accepted the job, ‘and I would therefore wind up on the street, a drug-addicted prostitute.’ Terrified, she turned down the offer.But it was the warping of the ...”

“... in DIY self-pickling. Compared with Highsmith in her seventies, her fellow drunk-dyke genius Elizabeth Bishop looked like a fresh-blooming flower in her later years – a regular Goop-enhanced Gwyneth.Then there was the compulsive sexual promiscuity – a festival of glut, recrimination and endlessly renewed licentious squalor (I almost wrote ...”

“... whose writing had petered out before his conversion, adds little to the theme, while a chapter on Elizabeth Anscombe does not get beyond superficialities. The ‘too little read’ Maurice Baring will remain so. If McDonagh had broadened her gaze from the tormented lodestars of the Catholic literary revival and included more of the (sometimes ...”

“... She stands in the mirror and turns; someone is watching over her shoulder.Engel’s contemporary Elizabeth Hardwick has something to say about this form of continuation in a story called ‘Cross-Town’:And out of the index cards and the coughing tapes your biography will be preserved and in this, having caught the public eye, you will be trapped in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”