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“... 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 ...”

“... a profession of Protestant faith in Shakespeare’s own hand, even a letter to the bard from Queen Elizabeth herself flowed from his ready quill. And once Ireland had sorted out a supply of ink and techniques for making paper look old, why not write versions of King Lear and Hamlet which omitted the awkward bawdy scenes? Why ...”

“... view which is much more congenial to him. James I in particular is not a favourite of his. Unlike Elizabeth, James relished Lord Henry Howard’s ‘unctuous brand of flattery’. He also had a penchant for beautiful young men. Ashton makes no moral judgment about their gender, but he is very critical of the fact that, unlike ...”

“... including Colette, Edith Head, Deborah Kerr, Leslie Caron, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Marni Nixon, Julie Andrews, Mia Farrow, Jeanne Moreau, Merle Oberon, Capucine and Cher. I could advance a lesbian interpretation of Audrey Hepburn’s oeuvre, though that is not my present aim: instead, I wish to inquire into reverberations ...”

“... escape from a home where he was stripped of authority and placed under constant surveillance. As Elizabeth Foyster remarks in her assiduously researched, crisply written biography, ‘nobody was interested in the grievances of a low-born French speaker when they stood opposed to the words of an honourable English nobleman and his family.’ Not long after ...”

“... as Winston Churchill used to grip the arm of his chair, the duty of the male was to provide. For Elizabeth Baker, an incisive young woman who had trained as a teacher, the male’s job was to ‘make something’ of himself. The domestic inappropriateness of this view was quickly overshadowed by the economic hopelessness in which she and her brood were ...”

“... the play in question was not Shakespeare’s at all). Shapiro then glances at the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, and considers, finally, Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical immortality. This phenomenon, we are again assured, is emphatically not the result of any desire or ability to transcend his own times: ‘He understood his age perfectly, and the ...”

“... apparent that such projects were attempted before Charles’s reign, by a client of Burghley under Elizabeth and by the Earl of Exeter under James. They were advocated by such ‘apolitical’ writers as Camden. During the 1630s the promoters of the works included the King and courtiers, but also a local entrepreneur, Sir ...”

“... monarch, out of the rough and ready business of governing its Indian possessions. To introduce the king or queen risked elevating the Indian rajas to an inconvenient status, licensing them to consider themselves as lieges or allies of the crown, with the right to approach the monarch directly on all sorts of embarrassing questions. The rapacious Wellesley and ...”

“... precedent that the House could make law without the participation of the House of Lords or of the king. He had established the right of electors to elect whomever they please and the principle that no constituency could be represented by anyone they had not elected. He had brought before the British public the injustices of the electoral system and the need ...”

“... and others who hoped, that the Queen might outlive her eldest son, so that he would never become king at all. Such might have been the gloomy midcareer appraisal of His Royal Highness Prince Albert Edward, later (and briefly) King Edward VII. And it is not coincidental that many of the same things are now being said about ...”

“... with the emphases of Jonson’s The Forest, where the country is praised ‘as an image of the King’s peace’. When set beside ‘anti-courtly’ Spenserian verse, ‘To Penshurst’ and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ ‘give the sense of a nation which, whatever its faults, is essentially harmonious and well-ordered and reflects credit on its ...”

“... royal nobleman in her house. She thought Surrey’s father, the Duke of Norfolk, might become king if Henry VIII died without a male heir (‘if ought should come to the King but good, his father should stand for king’), and declared that above his bed were arms ‘very like the ...”

“... hadn’t hitherto been known: no one had ever supposed that they were worth knowing about. Bluff King Hal, Bloody Mary, the Queen of Scots, the Virgin Queen: like Drake finishing his game of bowls and Raleigh spreading his cloak over a puddle, they all belonged as much to folklore as to history; and folklore, so far as enlightened opinion was ...”

“... their own parishes and perhaps barely understood what they were dying for. An Essex servant girl, Elizabeth Folkes, aged 20, was asked what she understood about the nature of the Eucharist. Did she believe in a ‘substantial and real presence’ in the host? She answered: ‘It was a substantial lye, and a reall lye.’ She had been questioned once and let ...”