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“... Creation. Significantly, Borges’s essay was focused on the mid-17th-century programme of Bishop John Wilkins for a universal language capable of accurately registering each and every occupant of the world, a scheme Wilkins developed at least in part to help his calculations of the original contents of Noah’s Ark. Debates about the Flood and its ...”

“... Continental context.’ J.A. Froude, A.E. Pollard and J.E. Neale, hagiographers of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, are demolished with equal relish. The pillars of the English historical tradition, whom A-level history students were urged to read uncritically a generation ago, receive a vigorous kicking. Only one merits Norman Davies’s unqualified approval. It ...”

“... increasingly hard to sustain: James Sharpe’s Bewitching of Anne Gunter includes the story of Elizabeth Stile, executed in 1579, told, for what is I think the first time in modern scholarly literature, as if she believed herself to be a witch. The modern history of the witch-hunt begins with a series of books published nearly thirty years ago by Hugh ...”

“... whim, just as the events of Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas are cast in a perpetual autumnal haze (as Elizabeth Bowen noted), in defiance of the usual arrangement of the seasons. Anglo-Irish disdain for the tedious requirements of naturalism? Certainly a moral pattern takes precedence over verisimilitude, in Irish fiction of the last century, and it’s usually ...”

“... Britain and on the Continent with a succession of séances, two or three of which were attended by Elizabeth and Robert Browning. On the first occasion, an unseen hand lowered a clematis wreath (laurel was hard to come by) on Elizabeth’s brow. She believed in spiritual manifestations, but Robert, though he shared her ...”

“... Irish pride and nationalism have always been magnified in the United States. In her autobiography, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the leader of the American Communist Party, described the attitudes of her Irish-born mother and American-born father: ‘Mama did not deny the faults or glorify the virtues of the Irish, as our father did. We were amused at this and often ...”

“... form, and several transform it into a vehicle for poetic liberty. At the more extreme end is Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sonnet’, which, with 14 half-rhymed or unrhymed lines of six syllables or fewer, looks like the left-hand half of a sonnet cracked down the middle. It begins ‘Caught – the bubble/in the spirit level’ and goes on ‘Freed ...”

“... Jo Gladstone’s interesting study of John Ray quotes a passage that she attributes to Bishop Wilkins when it is, in fact, from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, and elsewhere she says that Thomas Blount ‘first used the title term “hard words’ ” when, in fact, it appears in the title of the really rather famous book by Cawdrey published 14 ...”

“... a synonym for “safe space” in which alikeness rather than difference could be explored.’ Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about Billie Holiday, ‘Songs for a Coloured Singer’, is called out for appropriation in 1983:This is a white woman’s attempt – respectful, I believe – to speak through a Black woman’s voice. A risky undertaking, and it ...”

“... way. In the end, the explosion in the Irish Church came from within. When the news broke that the Bishop of Galway had fathered a son and, in Kenny’s words, ‘deserted and denied mother and child’, Mary Kenny felt that she at first took the matter too lightly. ‘Think of the Borgia Popes,’ she said jokingly to an editor in Dublin. ‘During these ...”

“... and law court methods) of crimes against property. ‘Pitiful necessity’ was often the cause. Elizabeth Beckford, at 70 the second oldest woman aboard, had been given – or rather robbed of – seven years for stealing 12 pounds of Gloucester cheese. Her senior was a vendor of rags and old clothes, aged 82, who was to be Australia’s first suicide. But ...”

“... at Louth in October 1536 were duly enforced in the reigns of Henry VIII’s children Edward and Elizabeth. So much for the events. But it is the interpretation of the events which has generated a small shelf’s worth of books and articles on the subject of the Pilgrimage of Grace, of which Hoyle’s is only the latest, if the most accessible. There are two ...”

“... and Herrick seems to have had some sympathy with the more moderate forms of worship advocated by Bishop John Williams. Herrick could play with the language of Catholic worship, satirise Puritans who used long hair to hide ears that had been cropped as a punishment for their writings, and criticise kings who extorted money from their subjects. He was not ...”

“... is, at best, fruitless egoism. This doctrine, which would have been music to the ears of Elizabeth I, had some distinguished adherents. The period of Lipsius’s life and influence is the period of the external conservatism and internal radicalism of Montaigne and of Bacon. It is also the period of the Family of Love, the heretical sect with which ...”

“... scare, were, in fact, unable to produce any examples of heretical thought except an errant bishop in France. (William Forbes, who has been casually labelled Arminianist by some modern historians, seems to have been imbued with medieval Augustinianism.) ‘Arminian’ was a useful term of abuse and, along with accusations of incest and ...”