“... But the lure of political advancement was too great. As the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth I’s second most important adviser, and the nephew of Lord Burghley, her chief counsellor, he had been born to the purple. But he was the youngest of five sons, and was still unprovided for financially when his father died suddenly in 1579, leaving the ...”

“... murderer of his wives, was continued by Somerset, the murderer of his brother, and completed by Elizabeth, the murderer of her guest. Sprung from brutal passion, nurtured by selfish policy, the Reformation in England displayed little of what had, in other countries, distinguished it – unflinching and unsparing devotion, boldness of speech, and singleness ...”

“... only Bibles to do so were its Tudor ancestors which were given official status by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I: first the Great Bible of 1539, making the announcement on the title page of its 1541 edition, and then the fairly light revision of the Great Bible undertaken in the 1560s by the Elizabethan episcopate. This Bishops’ Bible took up the label of ...”

“... and had had nearly thirty of her poems published in literary journals or book collections, Elizabeth Bishop, then 28, admitted in a letter to Moore: ‘I scarcely know why I persist at all. It is really fantastic to place so much on the fact that I have written a half-dozen phrases that I can still bear to reread without too much ...”

“... Even so, I teared up at Michelle Obama tearing up, as she said, speaking to a group of girls at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson comprehensive school in Islington: ‘All of you are jewels. When I look at a performance like this, it just reminds me that there are diamonds like this all over the world.’ She told them that they were the women who would ‘build ...”

“... She understands remarkably well the ‘state of the nation’ idiom that came naturally to Elizabeth Gaskell, as it increasingly did to many Victorian writers, and which made her so popular with a growing class of thoughtful and responsible readers. This idiom has made a comeback today, and is often to be heard in the higher political correctness of ...”

“... sense of being somehow responsible for – of having failed to prevent – the death of his sister Elizabeth, when he was six and she was eight. The first passage I annotated from De Quincey’s autobiographical sketches is a memory of a fine day in June; Thomas is standing on the lawn beside the family house, at some distance from his brothers and ...”

“... properties to trivial springs. Nevertheless, Roman Catholics clung to their saintly lore and Queen Elizabeth suspected that they hung about such springs as Holywell, in Flintshire, plotting her downfall. The richer Catholics sought to travel to Continental spas, where dubious contracts abounded, and this traffic had to be regulated by a system of ...”

“... and their successors have raised. The granting of formal medical qualifications to women such as Elizabeth Blackwell (1849) and Elizabeth Garrett (1859) signalled not so much the opening as the re-opening of the field of medicine to women: a first assault against a relatively recent exclusion. Before the 19th century, as ...”

“... such as this cry out for psychological explanation, and an attempt to provide it has been made by Elizabeth Wirth Marvick, in The Young Richelieu. The attempt is bravely made, and it rests on solid archival research in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Archives, the British Library and other places. Yet, though the attempt to provide a psychological ...”

“... until this century when it began to be rejected as a usurpation of the God’s-eye view. Elizabeth Jolley, for instance, is quite capable of telling a story but seems to feel that she ought not to. Miss Peabody’s Inheritance is primarily about a headmistress with lesbian tendencies and her affairs with pupils and fellow teachers: but the story is ...”

“... have shared Cixous’s belief in a distinct style of writing rooted in women’s experience? Elizabeth Scott-Baumann’s new book, Sex and Style, investigates something like écriture féminine in the work of nine women poets writing in early modern England. Scott-Baumann’s claim is that these writers share a recognisable literary style, expressed both ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... will see that language like that would not appeal to Shaw. A graduate student with a thesis on Elizabeth Bishop, married to an academic who was her tutor before he was her husband, Shaw prefers a slightly archaic, sometimes Elizabethan diction. She talks about ‘the burden’ in her ‘belly’, and ‘giving suck’ to her baby; and comes up with ...”

“... The epigraph​ to Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel is taken from Jung: ‘Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.’ This might serve for any of Strout’s books, which repeatedly touch on loneliness and its causes ...”