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“... autobiography the novel, we should recall that the Anglican Church was widely Calvinist under Elizabeth and James. Cervantes’ Don Quixote, not so far as I know the consequence of a revolution, echoes on into 18th-century fiction, while the great European picaresque novel with its powerfully developed religious strain was, in the hands of the Spaniard ...”

“... Follow as she travels to Greece on a boat with Havelock Ellis, finds herself in Egypt just when King Tut’s tomb is opened, gets photographed by Man Ray, has sherry with Elizabeth Bowen, runs into Arthur Waley at Iseult Gonne’s, becomes Freud’s analysand in 1933, reads her poetry before the future Queen ...”

“... 400th anniversary of Hilliard’s death this year has been marked by the publication of Elizabeth Goldring’s impeccably researched new biography, and by an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Elizabethan Treasures, featuring ninety works by Hilliard and Oliver, accompanied by an excellent catalogue by Catharine MacLeod.* Both books are ...”

“... murders of William the Silent and Henri III and Henri IV of France; the attempt to poison Queen Elizabeth; the numerous plots, in both his kingdoms, on the life of James VI and I – for threats and rumours of regicide to place nations on recurrent high alert. In life and art alike, there was a special frisson to death by poison. In 1612 the death of ...”

“... their church windows, and cared not a fart for any orders of the Parliament not confirmed by the king. Images were not only objects of belief: they were visible symbols of the unity of communities, and an unsuccessful symbol of unity is a symbol of disunity. Images were not an issue, like predestination, which authorities could ever hope to confine to the ...”

“... had been the Duke of Windsor’s mistress before marriage and that England’s recently abdicated king sometimes drank too much. A writ was served and the action heard before the Lord Chief Justice, who declared in court that ‘these particular libels, a jury might think, appear almost to invite a thoroughly efficient horse-whipping.’ Author and publisher ...”

“... it officially was) practised religious toleration. When Henri duc d’Anjou was elected king in January 1573, only months after tens of thousands of Protestants had been massacred in his native France, he was forced to submit to a resolution which ran: Since there is in our Commonwealth no little disagreement on the subject of religion, in order to ...”

“... than ours: perdere la bussola, the loss not merely of bearings but of the compass itself. Queen Elizabeth II will still be around for the vote, I know, but as little more than an accusing spectre. Within less than half of her own reign the glamour of Monarchy has vanished. All that the Crown now accomplishes is to counterpoint and somehow exaggerate an ...”

“... Anthology, where Pound explicitly pays his dues by way of the parenthetical epigraph: ‘(King Charles)’. But in this case Pound’s adaptation is so inferior that there’s no point quoting anything but the Browning original. This is a deeper and more troubling poem than ‘Kentish Sir Byng’, because it articulates the all but suicidal sentiment ...”

“... current Brechtology has a subject, it is Brecht’s relationship to that process. Elizabeth Wright’s Post-Modern Brecht (1989) sought simply to claim him as an embryonic Post-Modernist, on the superficially bizarre basis that the Marxist-Leninist playwright was ‘sceptical of what Lyotard called the great narrative, the great danger, the ...”

“... documents rendered them responsible to the courts for any breaches of the law. For although the king could do no wrong, he was not above the law. It was for the courts to say what the law was, and for Parliament to alter it, in so far as it could be altered, for at this time there was a general belief in fundamental law, unalterable by any human ...”

“... off poems of congratulation to his former pupil. Within three years he was back at court, as king’s orator. In addition to his official duties, he produced further poems of praise, lament and vituperation, the latter often in the form of ‘flytings’, the object of which was to be as insulting to an enemy or rival as the wit could manage. They ...”

“... Once​ upon a time – and certainly before the Roman conquest – Britain was ruled by good King Lud. According to the utterly unreliable History of the Kings of Britain by the 12th-century Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, Lud rebuilt the walls of London, ‘encircling it with countless towers. He also commanded the citizens to construct houses … so that no city in all the surrounding kingdoms (some far distant) could boast finer residences ...”

“... who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching ...”

“... with other versions of that photograph and with black and white line drawings – acorns, a pearly king and queen, a pub table, a crown – that are a convincing imitation of the style of Edward Bawden’s linocuts. His other contribution, a more than life-size bronze skull, Head of a Fallen Giant, at first glance an exotic nail-studded fetish, turns out to be ...”