“... inroads in the Northern Cape and could even evict the ANC from its Eastern Cape stronghold of Port Elizabeth. The ANC’s corruption and maladministration have demoralised even its own activists, but the other main reason for its plight is the decisive movement towards the DA of both the country’s 1.3 million Indians and, especially, the mixed-race ...”

“... the filth of unavailability once and for all. Suspect device: the Blackberry. Before I became the Elizabeth Taylor of the telecommunications universe, I had loved being out of contact. I wandered round galleries and read books at the edge of lakes. I ruminated on trains. I slept all night. Then, one day, I realised something that other people had realised ...”

“... on the evidence of directions taken by several serious poets (Robert Lowell and Robert Bly, Elizabeth Bishop and Ed Dorn are those who come to mind) – that the North American imagination is beginning to define its identity no longer on a West-East axis, across the Atlantic to Europe, but North-South, across the Rio Grande and down to Buenos Aires. If ...”

“... up three wide steps covered in yellow linoleum. There, not knowing how to choose, I gravitated to Elizabeth Bowen – along with others, including Compton Mackenzie and Hugh Walpole, of whose writing I can’t now recall even the faintest flavour. I’d never heard of any of them – I’d not heard of anybody much – but I was reassured by bound sets of ...”

“... profession, later to become a circus equestrienne’); it can also be detected here and there in Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005). But it was still surprising that comedy was so prominent in the interrogatory toolkit he then took to using on opinionated figures closely modelled on himself. ‘My guess is he unbuttons himself when I am ...”

“... level, Mansfield’s was a model career and Samuel Smiles wrote of him with reverence. His wife, Elizabeth, to whom he was devotedly married for 46 years, was the daughter of an earl and the granddaughter of a lord chancellor. A dutiful but not excessively devout Anglican, he prospered at the bar, then entered Parliament and almost at once was appointed ...”

“... woman?’ (emphasis on the question mark). Then he shifts to the deck of the merchant ship Elizabeth, en route from Livorno to New York City in 1850, whose passengers included the 40-year-old Fuller, ‘in a white nightgown, your hair fallen long’, with her young Italian lover (to whom she may or may not have been married) and their one-year-old ...”

“... the bewildered hunter, for the very day Natty killed the buck he also saved the judge’s daughter Elizabeth from an attack by an enraged cougar, and the grateful father is inclined to be lenient – but the law comes first. At this stage Cooper clearly did not foresee Natty developing into the hero of a string of books, much less emerging as the mythic ...”

“... any more’. A chastened inadequacy is more honourable than avidity.In ‘Poor Franzi’ (1954), Elizabeth, a well-intentioned American girl working for the occupation forces after the war, simply can’t comprehend the experience of the young man she’s going to marry, around whose history and character – ‘blandness and good manners and something ...”

“... Princess Mary. Anne’s first pregnancy was successful, and produced another girl, the Princess Elizabeth. Then she miscarried at least twice. It was not until his third marriage that Henry had a son who lived. Both those daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, were women of great ability, and in their very different ways were ...”

“... where he ran amok, insulting generals and riding the equestrian statues. His second marriage, to Elizabeth Hardwick, was essentially an enduring one, and her devotion and intelligence illuminate and support this biography. Other women promised a new leaf, and eventually there was the romance of a departure for England: ‘a new alliance’, as he put ...”

“... left for that purpose. There is a mother in Pride and Prejudice, but there are also two aunts: Elizabeth Bennet’s Aunt Gardiner and Mr Darcy’s aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh. It is an aspect of Austen’s genius that, while the novel negates the power and influence of Elizabeth’s mother, neutralises her by being ...”

“... what housewives make of his sailors, like the one who leans on a table spread with good things in Elizabeth David’s Book of Mediterranean Food. The housewives doubtless thought they were nice lads; in life and art the physical types which attracted Minton were butch. The boys in Hockney’s Cavafy illustrations would not have stepped so easily or so ...”

“... of a project. Poovey’s book clearly owes much to the three-volume collection of primary texts by Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Sheets and William Veeder, published by Garland Press in 1983 under the title The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America 1837-1883. The avowed purpose of this substantial work, which has now made a welcome ...”

“... unremarkable. This matter-of-factness is seen also in a series of violent narrative surprises. Elizabeth, an old college friend of Dexter’s, who turns up at the beginning of the novella, strolls into a shop and begins stealing things. We’ve had no preparation for her behaviour at all, and the narrative immediately moves on. Athena waits at a tram ...”