After finding out that the
Monospace
font doesn't support italics, I set about trying to find a suitable replacement.
This EmacsWiki page lists a way to print some example text in all of the fonts on the system, which is very helpful for comparing what's available. The problem with it is that it displays all fonts, not just the monospace fonts, which isn't useful. (For those of you not in the know, all programming is done with monospace or uniform-width fonts, meaning that
l
and
m
are the same size).