“... 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 ...”

“... wanted produced the forgeries of William-Henry Ireland in the 1790s (which included a letter from Elizabeth I thanking him for his ‘prettye Verses’) and John Payne Collier in the 1830s and 1840s (which showed Shakespeare to have been a well-connected member of metropolitan literary circles from an early stage). But for Shapiro the real villain is Edmond ...”

“... Prix de Flore, which rewards younger, avant-garde-ish writers. Hate is the story of four people: Elizabeth Levallois, the narrator, a cultural journalist at Libération; her long-term lover, a married media academic called Jean-Michel Leibowitz; her friend Dominique Rossi, a gay activist; and William Miller, an unbalanced young man who is Dominique’s lover ...”

“... There are tales of miraculous conceptions, like that of Sarah, who conceived Isaac at 90, and Elizabeth, who, according to Luke, conceived John, later the Baptist, in old age. Here Luke obviously had his eye on Sarah and also liked the symmetry between Elizabeth, very old, and Mary, about 12 or 13, both pregnant in ...”

“... in extreme lighting. In the 1940s, it’s the princesses who get the baroque-deco treatment: Elizabeth and Margaret half-drowned in sudsy blossom, or the future queen in three-quarter-length profile and spangled dress, a mere formal excuse for an assemblage of gleaming furniture and gilt picture frames. In 1953, Beaton fretted in his diary that he might ...”

“... the reality: £4 billion over budget for Crossrail is a parsimonious bargain for the rebranded Elizabeth Line. This money is flighty, but it is very serious. It maps the territory where we might be able to pick up the threads of the General Theory of Everything. A lot of people are talking, releasing statements, providing updates, playing themselves in ...”

“... Elizabeth Hardwick​ was wary of biographers. She called life-writing ‘a scrofulous cottage industry’, a ‘consistent fiction’ masquerading as truth. Its practitioners were necrophiliacs ‘quick in pursuit of the dead’. In her book on Herman Melville, she wrote of the ‘violent exuberance’ that accompanied his rediscovery by critics in the 1920s: ‘He was unearthed … the whole skeleton, as it were, put under the floodlights, a penetrating radar giving the bones a voluptuous rebirth ...”

“... House of Stairs by Barbara Vine (the pseudonym of the crime writer Ruth Rendell), whose narrator Elizabeth Vetch has in the 1980s to deal with a friend, Bell Sanger, who has served a ‘life sentence’ for a late Sixties murder and come out again. Murderers used to be hanged. Now they are set free and come back to live among us. Or to exist. I look at ...”

“... Browning (re)constructed a classical epic in 12 books, a ‘novel-poem’ to rival his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, a historical romance to challenge Scott, an urban realist fiction to emulate Dickens or Balzac, a religio-philosophical-aesthetic treatise in the modern vein of the Higher Criticism. From the 1830s he had been a ...”

“... distanced, but only by a margin, from the French mignon. Sir Robert Naunton famously insisted that Elizabeth I’s ministers were ‘only favourites, not minions’. Was her first minister for much of the reign, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, such a favourite? In this volume, Paul Hammer distinguishes his position from that of a courtier-favourite such ...”

“... is used elsewhere in Sense and Sensibility and in Austen’s next novel, Pride and Prejudice. When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Mr Darcy’s proposal, she nonetheless finds herself gratified ‘to have inspired unconsciously so strong an affection’. To be ‘unconscious’ is simply not to notice something in the world around you. Then, in Mansfield Park, these ...”

“... readers, who can’t bear the chill that emanates from these works, especially Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005). The same chill can be picked up in Coetzee’s critical essays, where it is likely to appear as offhand authority. A poem by Paul Celan, we learn in the collection Inner Workings, ‘absorbs from the Surrealists ...”

“... Thomas Seymour, the Lord Protector’s brother, and his marital designs on the 15-year-old Lady Elizabeth, the future (Protestant) queen. She is disliked by the Lord Protector, who favours her elder half-sister, Lady Mary, the future (Catholic) queen. William Cecil, a rising royal secretary, is protective towards ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... anyone other than the men whom they eventually marry. Even if her family is incredulous, we share Elizabeth Bennet’s ‘absolute certainty’ by the end of Pride and Prejudice (1813) that Mr Darcy’s affection ‘was not the work of a day, but had stood the test of many months’. We are also likely to suspect, quite some time before Emma, that ‘Mr ...”