“... In January 1945, as she was preparing her collection North & South for publication, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her publishers to say she was worried that she had written nothing about the war: The fact that none of these poems deal directly with the war, at a time when so much war poetry is being published, will, I am afraid, leave me open to reproach ...”

“... and theory: Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Jonathan Goldberg, Judith Fetterley, Jean Schwind, Elizabeth Ammons. Acocella takes no prisoners. She is queen of the devastating citation, and more than happy to let the jargon-mad professors hang themselves. Thus poor Robert Nelson, author of a 1988 book on the novelist, gets mercilessly dinged for writing ...”

“... more than one cultural tradition flowing into the river of same-sex unions in the British Isles. Elizabeth Brown in the Traditio volume suggests that the distribution of wed-brothers in (the chronicles of) Norman lands may imply a powerful Scandinavian tradition. Brent Shaw cites an account of Celtic homosexual marriage, overlooked by Boswell, preserved by ...”

“... had designs on me, for marriage. You see, marriage for Melodia was what it must have been for Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Hutton, no big thing; and in Melodia’s case, a natural consequence of sodomy and prayer. Mother sat between Melodia and me, with Father across the table, scowling at the prices on the dinner menu. I know what he was thinking: how ...”

“... myth’: the strong Tudor will to believe that God had worked through history to bring about Elizabeth I, whose spiritual progenitor was the great and good Henry V. Perhaps he did, up to a point. But the plays say something rather different, with a full human meaning that goes well beyond political propaganda. The climax of the second sequence, Henry ...”

“... the Canadian border, twelve miles west of the state line’, where a high schooler could look like Elizabeth Taylor in saddle shoes and MacLachlan, as Special Agent Dale Cooper, had the same quality Kael detected in Cary Grant: ‘Being the pursued doesn’t make him weak or passively soft. It makes him glamorous.’ It was, really, an advert – for the ...”

“... argues –is both remembering lines he wrote perhaps ten years earlier in the reign of Elizabeth, and also recalling performances by the actors who spoke his lines. He seems to be drawing on nature for his conceit, but equally he is drawing on the created nature of his own art. The young man is a flawed, brilliant royal actor, and he is also an ...”

“... is to a 17th-century Savile and his son and daughter-in-law, done by Maximilian Colt who sculpted Elizabeth I’s monument in Westminster Abbey. Elsewhere in the church are two faceless reclining figures and, acting as corbels, some huge grotesque stone heads. I don’t take much notice of these but it turns out that these carvings are why the church is ...”

“... breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. Elizabeth Bishop, ‘At the Fishhouses’ ‘Like what we imagine knowledge to be’. There are many ways of imagining knowledge – this is a proposition not likely to provoke much dispute. But how about this one? There are many ways in which the imagination ...”

“... Charge of the Light Brigade, Cecil was a frail woman with a tiny birdlike skull, looking more like Elizabeth I (in later life) than Edith Sitwell ever did (and minus her sheet metal earrings). Irish, she had a Firbankian wit and a lovely turn of phrase, ‘Do you know the Atlantic at all?’ she once asked me, and I put the line into Habeas Corpus and got a ...”

“... in the Countie of Lancaster (1613), illustrates the importance attached to unforced confessions: Elizabeth Device ‘made a very liberall and voluntarie Confession, as hereafter shall be given in evidence against her, upon her Arraignment and Triall’; and passing sentence, Justice Bromley said: ‘very few or none of you, but stand convicted upon your own ...”

“... reconciliation (among other things, he organised the handshake between Martin McGuinness and Queen Elizabeth in 2012), will lead the investigation team.These gestures don’t change the fact that families are being asked to give up a set of legal processes and put their trust in a new, untested system designed and imposed by one party to a multi-sided ...”

“... and peasant hovels to the heart of the court. Without classicisation, no one would have addressed Elizabeth I as a Faerie Queene, and fairies may never have been seen as appropriate playmates for the children of the well-to-do.Fairies faced another new adversary in Enlightenment rationalism. Hobbes declared that they were nothing more than false sense ...”

“... a recalibrating of history: as a hospital or asylum vanishes, we thirst for stories of Queen Elizabeth I at Tilbury or Pocahontas coming ashore, in her dying fever, at Gravesend. The documented records of the lives of those unfortunates shipped out to cholera hospitals on Dartford Marshes, or secure madhouses in the slipstream of the M25, can be dumped ...”

“... sketch out a simpler diet than we’re used to, an equivalent for rainy, hectic Britain of what Elizabeth David discerned in the Mediterranean diet when she called it ‘the rational, right and proper food for human beings to eat’. Except there’s no romantic sense, as there was in David, of a benign landscape supporting people who understand its ...”