“... have drawn on their authors’ lives; Jane Eyre, subtitled ‘An Autobiography’, is one example, David Copperfield another. The Brontës tried to conceal their identities behind the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, and the consequences were, first, that their works were scrutinised for evidence of their gender ...”

“... literary executor) saw fit to print – based on the texts of the 1846 and 1850 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell and the 1847 Wuthering Heights – is that it encourages us to read the poems and the novel in the order of their composition. O’Gorman, a strong proponent of the view that Gondal is the ‘key’ to Emily’s imagination, is quick to point ...”

“... and the fact of the canvas. He could draw in the air, omnipotently. ‘Empty of imagery,’ David Anfam writes in a beautiful description of the drip paintings, ‘they feel intensely full; lacking overt reference to nature, the organic patterns of growth nevertheless engulf us; rather monochromatic overall, strong and metallic hues shimmer through ...”

“... all too aptly named Hubert Bland, the incompetent Clennell Wilkinson, the pompous and plagiaristic Ellis Roberts. And there were writers who, like David Garnett, simply couldn’t manage the world of journalistic deadlines. Today, leftish journals face an ever-widening gulf between the concerns of ‘cultural politics’ and ...”

“... the consolations of an essential self. There never was such a thing, for Barthes any more than for David Hume, and we are doubtless all the better for it. What looks like a loss is actually a liberation. Unity is an illusion, and consistency is more a vice than a virtue. Postmodernism is full of personality cults, but they know themselves to be ...”

“... satire and sentiment’. The shape of that sentiment became increasingly clear. In a eulogy for David Foster Wallace, who killed himself in 2008, Saunders explained his friend’s accomplishment in terms that made it hard not to imagine he was also describing his own aspirations: ‘Something about the prose itself was inducing a special variety of openness ...”

“... David Solkin​ ’s new book is designed to replace Painting in Britain 1530-1790, a volume of the Pelican history of art by Ellis Waterhouse, which was first published in 1953 and appeared in five separate editions, the last in 1994, nine years after Waterhouse’s death. Waterhouse’s history was quickly recognised as a classic ...”

“... a man’s domain on equal terms. So, too, with the slightly more ambiguously gendered Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. As in surgery, literary sex change is an ugly operation and female chauvinists must rejoice to see a complete turn of the wheel in those areas of fiction where the practice is still necessary. When the Texan six-footer Tom Huff wished to ...”

“... for their film Shrek 2 be removed from the site. Other torrent sites kept a lower profile. Alan Ellis, a 21-year-old computer science graduate, created Oink’s Pink Palace in order to improve his web scripting and database administration skills (or so he would claim later in court). Oink was an invitation-only site which hosted torrent trackers. It ...”

“... wagon – made their way to a port city, sailed seasick and miserable in steerage, passed through Ellis Island, and headed off to wherever they had contacts with those who had preceded them. On landing in the New World, my relatives stayed in the cities of the North-East – Boston, New York and Montreal. (This allows us to say with some confidence that they ...”

“... held the essentialist view that biology is the cause of homosexuality. One of them was Havelock Ellis, who wrote an ‘opinion’ published with The Well of Loneliness. Stephen Gordon is born ‘a narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered little tadpole of a thing’: her physical characteristics, which are often repeated, are intended to show that her later sexual ...”

“... living, however eminent. Take Mike Newell, who wanted Rupert to do a bit of work for the role of David Blakely, the guy killed by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England. Newell wanted to see Rupert’s pain. But, as Rupert himself admits, he was ‘a riddle as an actor. On screen, I had a lot of ...”

“... older books, was hardly read outside the universities, and reported a drop in enrolments. David Lehman’s Signs of the Times similarly notes the ‘disquieting fact that the number of students electing to major in literature has steadily declined over the last twenty years’. The question of ‘theory’ is bound up with this, since, in Lehman’s ...”

“... Israeli officials, for a man detained as a suspect in the killings of two Palestinians. The man, David Axelrod, is not related to Leon Trotsky. A man with the same name, who is a descendant of Trotsky, was questioned briefly by the police in a case of mistaken identity. The arcane character of this item, which was at the top of that day’s menu, might make ...”

“... exhibition of its own. A professor of drama at Columbia has just donated 193 pieces to the Perry Ellis archive at the Fashion Institute of Technology. ‘Traditionally most designers did not think of archiving their careers,’ Valerie Steele, the curator (and editor of Fashion Theory), points out. ‘Only very recently have they become aware that to ...”