“... Isles to Ferdinando I, grand duke of Tuscany, whose concern to see a non-Habsburg nominee succeed Elizabeth I prompted him to send Wotton on a mission to Scotland to warn James VI of a credible poisoning plot. Since Wotton’s connection with Essex made him an outlaw, he couldn’t travel through England, instead taking the ‘horse-killing route’ through ...”

“... thereafter never again. The sons and daughters of her master became her and her mother’s family. Elizabeth grew to cherish the bond between them and returned to see them after she had gained her freedom and become a successful dressmaker at the White House. Characteristically, she describes these strange loyalties as both reciprocal and ...”

“... in economics. Why the economic failures? Part of the answer is to be found between the lines of Elizabeth Durbin’s important and absorbing study of the ‘New’ Fabian economists of the Thirties, who tried to hammer out an intellectually respectable economic strategy for a future Labour government, in place of the mish-mash of Utopian aspirations and ...”

“... to bed. One reason people kept their clothes on is that they were almost never alone. In 1674 Elizabeth Myres, like many servants, slept in a truckle-bed at the foot of her mistress’s bed. When her mistress took a lover it was Elizabeth’s job to help him pull off his shoes, after which he would climb into her ...”

“... On Valentine’s Day​ 1661 Elizabeth Pepys and her husband, Sam, rose early and walked from their house behind the Tower of London down Seething Lane. They were to visit one of Sam’s superiors, William Batten, surveyor of the navy. The custom was that women should take the first man they saw as their Valentine, so long as he was no relation ...”

“... constantly to flatten himself into a cartoon. We come to understand why Keats was fond of him and Elizabeth Barrett admired him, as well as the reasons his son despised him and his painting failed. Even so, Haydon is not the hero, or even quite the centre of the book. A Sultry Month is a demonstration of how martyrdom takes place in a corner. We see exactly ...”

“... In 1623, English foreign policy was dominated by one issue: the Palatinate. James I’s daughter Elizabeth had in 1613 married the Protestant Frederick, the elector palatine. In 1619 the Bohemian estates chose Frederick as king of Bohemia, and in the process ousted Archduke Ferdinand, who was a particularly devout and intolerant Catholic. Unfortunately for ...”

“... Cambridge; George VI by J.R.M. Butler of Trinity College, Cambridge; and the Queen as Princess Elizabeth by Sir Henry Marten of Eton. Time for a change? Lady Longford gives us to understand that Prince Charles is an expert on the subject, as he probably needs be in self-defence; it is to be hoped that he has supplemented these studies by meditation on the ...”

“... The new Pickering and Chatto edition of the complete works of Elizabeth Gaskell arrived just in time to mark a century since the publication of the previous standard text, A.W. Ward’s Knutsford Edition of 1906. In the meantime, Gaskell has been transformed from a charming woman who wrote wry nostalgic sketches to a major figure in Victorian studies ...”

“... note the effect of women poets upon the major males. To take a single example, in his printing of Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s ‘Upon the Death of her Husband’ as taken from the second edition of ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, he encourages the inference that Pope’s ‘Eloisa’ is alluded to in half-quotation in Rowe’s poem. That is a mistaken inference. Pope ...”

“... Having reached​ the grand age of 14, Elizabeth Barrett peered back into the distant past. She recorded in her journal that, when she was nine, ‘works of imagination only afforded me gratification and I trod the delightful fields of fancy without any of those conscientious scruples which now always attend me when wasting time in frivolous pleasure ...”

“... for only a few months of lectures at UCL. (One part of the dazzlement of his flight to Italy with Elizabeth Barrett two decades later was that he was at last leaving home.) In his twenties he wrote Pauline, Paracelsus and Sordello: all long, and all clad in the vesture of prestigious genres handed down from the Romantics; the poems are, respectively, a ...”

“... of them, who survived long enough to tell and tell again the shocking truth, for example, that Elizabeth Arden, one of the world’s richest women, lined the inside of her shoes with newspaper, or that Helena Rubinstein’s lawyer chose ‘the budget option’ at the funeral parlour after her death until wiser counsel prevailed, or that Diana Vreeland’s ...”

“... In April​ 1970, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick – both aged 53, married for 21 years – had just been on holiday together in Italy with their 13-year-old daughter, Harriet. Hardwick and Harriet had come home to New York, where Hardwick taught at Barnard College; Lowell had gone to Oxford to take up a fellowship at All Souls ...”

“... buy into the Protestant project of the last of the Tudors, and yet was still the chief ornament of Elizabeth’s Chapel Royal. Sharpe is as concerned to represent those disloyal to the dynasty as he is its supporters. In reality, 16th-century people did not normally think of ‘the Tudors’ or ‘the Tudor Age’. They thought of Henry VIII and his ...”