“... He is provoked by the only thorough survey of the impact of printing to have been written, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (published in 1979 and abridged as The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe in 1983). Eisenstein argued – though less insistently than Johns’s criticisms might suggest – that one ...”

“... by women, from Regina Maria Roche and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) to Jane Elgee (Lady Wilde) and Elizabeth Bowen. If they were solidly reputable bourgeois, Irish Protestants also preserved a secret pact with the vagrant, the deviant, the unspeakable terror lurking in the attic. Exuberant, gregarious and loquacious, they could also be ...”

“... deciding which side they were on. Which is why it is such a delight to make the acquaintance of Elizabeth Banks, the ‘American girl’ journalist who took London by storm in 1893 by donning various disguises and then publishing her experiences in the popular press. A number of Banks’s masquerades crossed class lines: she became a flower-girl and a ...”

“... a particular individual in the real world that the picture portrays – in my imagined case, Queen Elizabeth II. Plainly, one way we recognise the external subject of a picture is by seeing the resemblance between a particular real individual and the picture’s internal subject. But the question the resemblance theory is supposed to answer is not: ‘How does ...”

“... story and another. Pride and Prejudice has three turning-points, Moretti reckons. In Chapter 3, Elizabeth Bennet meets Darcy, and takes a dislike to him; in Chapter 34, he proposes to her; in Chapter 58, she accepts him. By Moretti’s count, Austen has supplemented these memorable scenes with about 110 episodes in which a fair amount happens, but nothing ...”

“... so sharp that they cut just to look at them. In Jack Ubaldi’s Meat Book, which he dictated to Elizabeth Crossman and published in 1987, he invoked his childhood in Umbria during the Great War in scenes worthy of Manzoni: When I was a little boy in Italy, every Fall my father and some of his friends and helpers slaughtered hogs. They processed them into ...”

“... was burned in effigy while tea and cakes were served. Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and the young Elizabeth Barrett were among those who felt that as women they must support the queen. That a woman, a wife and a mother could be subjected to such public humiliation seemed to undermine both ancient ideas of chivalry and modern ones of emancipation. There were ...”

“... joint sovereign by Parliament in 1689, we find the ancient too ancient for belief; according to Elizabeth Murray, young James’s acquaintance was an ancient who had known another ancient who had witnessed the event. The difficulty of finding a publisher and coming to terms induced Furnivall to complain about the ‘shiftiness and cupidity’ of the ...”

“... Saxton and his patrons, collaborators and surveyors, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was to Elizabeth I what Cromwell was to Henry VIII, could see England as a whole, and as a collection of coloured counties, together with lines of communication and the seats of its more notable inhabitants. This resource was not available to Cromwell, which is a little ...”

“... pseudonym of Arran Leigh (the name, as well as the poetry, revealed the influence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh). Celebrating the love of women and girls, this collection, a mixture of original compositions and translations, is full of sunlight and flowers. It is also prefaced by a sonnet in which the author addresses her ...”

“... into foul stinking privies, where you can find as many gods as you want if you care to look.’ Elizabeth Sampson, hauled before the bishop of London, put it more succinctly: Our Lady of Willesden ‘was a brent ars Elfe’. But as bishops went hunting through parishes for heresy, they also found people who held the old ways disturbingly close, with a ...”

“... all printers after him, kept his business afloat through these slenderest of texts. The historian Elizabeth Eisenstein caught this nicely when she observed that the printing revolution was not ‘centrally about the history of books’, but rather a wider, wilder sea of ‘images and charts, advertisements and maps, official edicts and indulgences’. The ...”

“... 16th century, England had already set up companies to trade with Russia and the Levant. In 1600, Elizabeth I chartered the East India Company (EIC) with monopoly rights for trade in the Indian Ocean region. Two years later, the Dutch East India Company was founded, the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC). These two organisations are prime examples of the ...”

“... late in life that she and Henri had met at a costume ball in Brussels. She had been dressed as Elizabeth I; he – appropriately enough for a prince – had been a slim, pomaded, unusually fetching Hamlet. 3. The Doted-On Wastrel Son. Prince Henri’s By-Blow, Most Likely. Bernhardt had him in 1864, when she was 20. She named him Maurice but she might as ...”

“... Mitchell’s mother who had more to do with forming the taste and character of the man Joe became. Elizabeth Parker Mitchell, called Betty, was the first on either side of the family to earn a college degree (Southern Presbyterian in Red Springs, North Carolina) and she wanted her children to feel they were part of the larger world. She subscribed to dozens of ...”