“... is a fighter. He’s a gentleman. He likes a beer.’ In​ her 1938 novel The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen describes a train trip from London to the Kent seaside. It’s one of the most extraordinary journeys in English literature. Without stretching the bounds of the real, she takes her young protagonist, Portia, from a 19th-century milieu – a ...”

“... sets, finessed by fashionable architects, are like parodies of facilities promised for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. And nobody but the owners can get at them. What could be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours ...”

“... the Lady Arrogant – as enemies sometimes called her – took one look at the famous picture of Elizabeth Eckford, the lone Black girl on her way into school being yelled at by a line of hate-filled whites, and decided that the most important thing going on in it was what it said about negligent Black parents and ‘the equally absent representatives of the ...”

“... the National Book Award for Fiction, which struck some as a sympathy vote at the time, much like Elizabeth Taylor’s best actress Oscar for Butterfield 8. The Big One eluded her. In 2003, J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize, which depressed Sontag, Moser writes, since ‘it made it highly unlikely that another English-language writer would receive it in the ...”

“... so her father reasoned, why burden her with the effete and fancy prolongation of ‘Elizabeth’? A miser in everything, he even cropped off half her name before he gave it to her. So ‘Lizzie’ it was, stark and unadorned, and she is a motherless child, orphaned at two years old, poor thing. Now she is two-and-thirty and yet the memory of ...”

“... Republic. The loan was secured by some jewels that may have belonged to the murdered Grand Duchess Elizabeth. When this matter resurfaced in the Dáil 25 years later it caused some embarrassment but the loan was quickly repaid and the jewels returned. (When, belatedly, Ireland reopened diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1974 I raised a wintry smile ...”

“... in the Arctic. Work consulted in the writing of this piece: Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert (Bloomsbury, 210 pp., £14.99, June 2006, 978 0 7475 8383 7) Dictionary of Environment and Conservation by Chris Park (Oxford, 522 pp., £19.99, November 2006, 978 0 19 860995 7) After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination by Kirkpatrick Sale ...”

“... the ceremonial life of the late medieval church and its systematic dismantling under Edward VI and Elizabeth. I hadn’t realised that the Elizabethan Settlement also meant the end of the mystery plays, which were pretty well forgotten by 1580. It shames me that I am more outraged by these events of nearly five hundred years ago (particularly by the ...”

“... much ground to cover) than the one-volume Oxford Book of French Short Stories (2002), edited by Elizabeth Fallaize, which opens three centuries later and shares half a dozen entries with the Penguin anthology. The forward march of one story per author suggests a canon in the making, or at least a genealogy, but McGuinness has more pluralist emphases in ...”

“... as a revelation by some of the leading figures in the field – David Treuer, Claudio Saunt, Elizabeth Fenn, Elliott West – and its depiction of a pumped-up period of Indigenous control has achieved far greater commercial success than the milder revisionism in favour of Native agency of Kathleen DuVal’s The Native Ground (2006) and Michael Witgen’s ...”

“... thinking just as easily licenses more or less apolitical fatalism. In The Sixth Extinction (2014), Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker concludes a book that for the most part consists of scrupulous reporting on collapsing ecosystems with a foray into speculative anthropology. In the Leipzig bar to which Mephistopheles invites Faust in Goethe’s play, Kolbert ...”

“... and unmoving as a stone deity. Obviously, I thought, we have strayed into the wrong ward, much as Elizabeth Taylor did in the film of Suddenly Last Summer. Mam was not ill like this. She had nothing to do with the distracted creature who sat by the nearest bed, her gown hitched high above her knees, banging her spoon on a tray. But as I turned to go I saw ...”

“... The Suez Canal, according to a recent history of the WHO by Marcos Cueto, Theodore Brown and Elizabeth Fee, made Europeans feel ‘dangerously close to India’.† In 1900 the fear was the imminent completion of a railway line linking Berlin to Mecca, seen as a cholera hotbed.Cholera, which returned to Europe repeatedly during the 19th century, was the ...”

“... Joaquin Castro and his twin brother, Julián, the presidential candidate; Bernie Sanders; Elizabeth Warren and various news anchors. Then he goes to sleep.*As the president is landing in El Paso on his healing mission, 600 ICE agents arrest 680 people, including many who have been in the US for more than a decade, at chicken processing plants in ...”

“... in XR’s name refers to rapid species depletion in the Anthropocene – and to Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction (2014) – but the recurring terms in its lexicon are ‘civilisation’, ‘society’, ‘community’, ‘culture’, ‘equality’, ‘politics’ and ‘change’. All XR intellectuals, including Kate Raworth, the ...”