“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as Ireland. There, Petronilla de Meath ended up on the losing side in a power struggle with the bishop of Ossory, and was burned to death after being tortured into confessing she was a ‘heretic sorcerer’. The fusion of witchcraft and heresy served to demonise religious dissent. In the 1420s there were campaigns against homicidal devil-worshipping women ...”

“... optimism being transmuted into varying forms of cautious hauteur in the writing of Jeffers, Frost, Bishop and Lowell. Paulin’s preference runs to the ‘palefaces’, but he includes samples from Blues singers, ‘the most authentic American political poets’. Finally, Paulin finds some room for the ‘anti-political tradition’. As he goes on to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Menalcas, the shepherd in Virgil’s Eclogues. Theodulf, the Spanish theologian and future bishop, evoked ‘Menalcas coming from his apple-rich estate./ He wipes the sweat from his forehead,/ enters supported by battalions of bakers and cooks,/and ius synodale gerit’ (‘he presides over the company’s good manners’ or over its ‘sauce’: both ...”

“... much, and whether there was anything in my room for ten or twenty dollars.’ With the help of a bishop and a kind friend, she applies for financial aid, and realises that she is now a ‘Commie’, the sort of term her father uses for those who accept help from the state. She uses the money to pay her rent, buy textbooks and get a new Sunday dress: ‘I ...”

“... at Magdalene) became known chiefly for its trove of 17th-century ballads, which supplied Bishop Percy with material for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Pepys himself was remembered, if at all, as a naval administrator who’d had a compulsion for buying up printed paper. The library’s catalogue – it wasn’t a secret – listed six ...”

“... were imposed on the textiles India produced, and cheap British cottons flooded the Indian market. Bishop Heber, that acute observer and author of the lines ‘though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile’, reported that ‘the peasantry in the Company’s provinces are, on the whole, worse off, poorer and more dispirited than the subjects of the ...”

“... rough divides between poems of here and elsewhere (a pattern which has become familiar since Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel), This Other Life is in five parts, with One, Three, and Five set in Britain and Two and Four in Italy. Within this oscillating progression, journeys abroad may involve returns (hence the first Italian poem is ...”