“... an English Madame de Staël. Her competitor for this honour – and another of her guests – was Elizabeth Montagu, against whom Hester shone for her excesses. ‘Mrs Montagu … reasons well, and harangues well, but wit she has none,’ Fanny Burney wrote. ‘Mrs Thrale has almost too much; for when she is in spirits, it bursts forth in torrents almost ...”

“... has hitched a ride on the Mr Darcy plotline, but without bothering to give her heroine any of Elizabeth Bennet’s spirit – raising a reprise of the Bridget question, why would a man of any style or substance fall for a lummox like her? To which Meyer offers two answers, one conventional and one less so: because she’s the avatar of the audience, which ...”

“... Turk’ and discusses several ‘captivity narratives’ (Linda Colley’s recent study of Elizabeth Marsh is a good example). In these, the flickering lamps of the seraglio throw shadows over historical events until it becomes impossible to see their original outline: fiction giving fact its form.In the final essay in the collection, Maher Jarrar ...”

“... the Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation. Based on a series of letters she sent to Elizabeth Sedgwick, a prominent New England abolitionist and sister-in-law of Kemble’s close friend the novelist Catharine Sedgwick, and modelled on the work of another novelist, the gothic ‘Monk’ Lewis’s account of a visit to his Jamaican estate, the ...”

“... work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume added the name of Thom Gunn. Insofar as there has ever been agreement on the matter, the Movement has been taken to consist of these nine writers. They appeared in these ...”

“... Others are more awkward and sometimes ill-judged, such as the digression in the letter from Elizabeth, who becomes Frankenstein’s wife, to Frankenstein about the place of Justine Moritz in their family: The republican institutions of our country have produced simpler and happier manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround ...”

“... the point of morality. Whereas descriptive talk aims to make our words fit the world, as the late Elizabeth Anscombe put it, evaluative talk such as morality aims to make the world fit our words. That the world may not, straight off, fit our moral words is part of what it is for the words to be moral rather than descriptive. The nature of the moral ought is ...”

“... financed by a group of 18 investors who called themselves the Company of Cathay. Two years earlier Elizabeth I had rejected a plan for a voyage through the Strait of Magellan: one of the great advantages of a northwest passage, besides the shorter distance, would be its remoteness from Spanish spheres of influence. And a northeast passage had already proved ...”

“... the only one available. It was no longer necessary to be rich to enter the debate about taste. Elizabeth Bennet could travel to Derbyshire in pursuit of the picturesque and Keats could seal a letter to his sister with a Tassie gem, one of the cheap reproduction cameos sold in Leicester Square. All this would repay more, or more delicate, analysis than ...”

“... moisturisers. ‘Because you’re worth it,’ as the slogan says. The law rarely intervenes. Elizabeth Arden was forced to change the name of her Orange Skin Food to Orange Skin Cream, since it was not technically a food; and Helene Curtis’s wrinkle-removing cream ‘was seized by regulators on the grounds that the company was making false claims for ...”

“... v. USA match at the anyway small Rustenburg stadium and the Nelson Mandela Bay stadium in Port Elizabeth hasn’t yet been more than two-thirds full.16 June. In the run-up to the World Cup there was a constant rumble of threatened strike action by groups keen to take advantage of this unbeatable blackmail opportunity. Now, however, we have seen wildcat ...”

“... in Flush and Woolf’s witty variations on the theme of biographical convention. The story of Elizabeth Barrett’s spaniel begins with his enormously long pedigree and ends with acknowledgment of the ‘very few’ authorities on which the book is based. What lies between more or less follows Keynes’s advice by taking real people (and a real ...”

“... supposedly formerly had. He doesn’t have to do much more than glance at a website to realise Elizabeth Alexander isn’t up to the task: she is, after all, writing actual poems. ‘I am large, I contain multitudes,’ Walt Whitman wrote in ‘Song of Myself’, and Packer’s nostalgia – as with many American nostalgists – is clearly shaped by the ...”

“... who made an even worse case for popular liberty. But there was no point in being censorious: Elizabeth had been an ‘excellent hypocrite’ with a talent for seeming more liberal than she was; James and Charles were less adroit, but they made an ‘excusable mistake’ when they overstepped their constitutional powers; Cromwell was a ‘fanatical ...”

“... at a kind of formal informality. In this, she resembles Cecil Beaton at the court of the young Elizabeth II: both produced a very highly worked art whose intended effect was of naturalness. She was very French. She spent three years in England, much of it – from Matlock to the Isle of Wight – reminding her of Switzerland. When visiting Bath she thought ...”