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“... spend many anxious years trying to fill. The experience of death, which also took his sisters Elizabeth and Jane, was decisive for Thomas, and not healed by the simultaneous experience of having a cold mother. Elizabeth de Quincey was Evangelical, rather aloof, and able, in the manner of Evangelicals, to shield her ...”

“... been proud of that as comic dialogue – yet we can hear an echo in it of John Bunyan’s wife Elizabeth pleading for his release before the justices in the repression which followed the Restoration: ‘because he is a Tinker, and a poor man, therefore he is despised, and cannot have justice.’ The mysterious human values of the poor, again and again ...”

“... and passes the days in Mrs Thrale’s coterie at Streatham. She records the bluestocking salons of Elizabeth Montagu (material for some savage vignettes in The Witlings). Garrick frequently turns up at the Burney home in Leicester Fields to entertain them with his impersonations. One evening Omai, the Tahitian tribal chief, comes to dinner (her brother James ...”

“... liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important public intellectuals in the 1790s. The last third ...”

“... process and not so simple larceny. Between process and, oh – just ‘write it!’ (to quote Elizabeth Bishop) – plagiarism. The answer, by way of explanation for which I offer the following narrative (or confession), is ‘no.’ Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that all such confessions are deceptive. To quote J.D. Salinger ...”

“... porous rather than diachronically self-contained; McGann’s ‘socialisation of texts’ and Elizabeth Eisenstein’s ‘printing press as an agent of change’ personify objects. Even the title of Darnton’s ground-breaking study of 18th-century French publishing, The Business of Enlightenment, exemplifies book historians’ flair for ...”

“... Presbyterianism to the freedoms of continental Europe. Married to an attractive but unstable man, Elizabeth Shand is told by her cosmopolitan sister-in-law, Elise, that ‘You and I, Elizabeth, would make one damned fine woman between us.’ The two end up running off to the Continent together, though whether their ...”

“... the Don Carlos story? Certainly he fell, received a visit from the dead monk and recovered, but as Elizabeth King and David Todd detail, the supposed origin of the machine is supported more by circumstantial evidence than positive proof; it’s an ‘elegant hypothesis’, the authors conclude. More interesting than the clockwork Diego’s uncertain ...”

“... to what both Donne and his modern critics reacted against: the conventional poetry of the Court of Elizabeth. Hence what might be called the Return of the Sonnet. It is studied now, not with the old Edwardian belletrism, but for its capacity to illuminate the whole courtly milieu within which the Petrarchan modes had their function, social and even ...”

“... As far as the central drama was concerned, I was wholly on the side of Mary, and wholly against Elizabeth. Elizabeth was a recurrent figure of loathing, occupying a place in my historical animosities on a par with that later to be filled by Churchill. I had my reasons. First, she was a patriot. Second, as I was to learn ...”

“... Most of the gains that women have made over the last decades have come about when women have taken a share of positions and opportunities hitherto reserved, by law or by custom, for men. And it is when this happens that we tend to get the most immediate and vivid sense that things have changed for both women and men. (The visibility of women in the US Army produces this sense in me, a Briton living in the US: it makes the British Army now seem peculiar ...”

“... of the novel we hear of the murder of a local mill-owner’s son – an event that was to inspire Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. Yet, though it can be readily situated in terms of a public history, the material of this absorbing novel – a sort of 19th-century handmaid’s tale – is bizarre enough. What will happen to the seven young women so ...”

“... getting to the end of their shelf-life) and to the fulsome praise of the then highly influential Elizabeth Bowen. Soon after the book’s publication its author wrote modestly and accurately of her gift. I quote from Diaries: ‘I do not think I have any “creative” genius. Whatever I have, if I have anything, is the capacity to recognise things. If I ...”

“... doctrine and practice of mental reservation which was particularly advocated by the Jesuits. While Elizabeth I, unlike contemporary Catholic sovereigns, never instituted any heresy prosecutions or conducted a general inquisition into religious beliefs, her government did demand conformity to the national Church, with fines for non-attendance, the requirement ...”

“... their talents; ‘The Psychopathology of the Sofa’ is the subtitle. A Butterfly Under a Stone by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She and her sisters, unknown to her father, brothers and later, her husband, befriended a poor girl dying of tuberculosis in ‘The Rookeries’, which were, after all, not a mile from their house. This fine and compassionate novel was ...”