“... Protestants, many puritans had unrealistic expectations of her successor. They therefore detested Elizabeth I’s church settlement of 1559, with its concessions to Lutherans and Catholics, including the requirements that ministers wear priestly vestments and accept Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. Church government was another bugbear. Allegiance ...”

“... least, the image of her husband – by her side for three reasons; first, he was already a titular king (of Sicily); second, as heir in his own right to the crown of Aragon, he had prospects of patronage and access to military clout; thirdly, and above all, he was the right sex. If one had to be a woman in the late Middle Ages, Spain was, relatively ...”

“... bringing to mind Max Miller’s celebrated appearance with a couple of potatoes – ‘King Edwards!’ – at the Royal Command Variety Performance. The potato became with great speed a staple food throughout Europe. It was greeted with especial enthusiasm in Ireland, where the moist climate is largely unsuited to the growing of wheat, and the ...”

“... and suborn themselves to your will? The real question of the relationship between the mad king and his clever, upright ministers is not about the abuse that the ministers suffer, or the justifications they give for sticking it out. It is about how the king manages to wring so much service out of them. Bolton’s ...”

“... 30 January 1540 the monks of Evesham Abbey were singing the Magnificat when messengers from the king interrupted them. ‘The monastery of Evesham was suppressed by King Henry VIII … at evensong time,’ John of Alcester recorded, ‘the convent being in the choir at this verse Deposuit potentes, and would not suffer ...”

“... of Powell’s account, nor does he quote the memorably bitchy but somehow reassuring judgment of Elizabeth Bowen that Jean Connolly was really ‘a big soft crook’. Without extenuating her husband, it suggests that she was not really cast for the role of victim. He liked women who were good at looking after him, but also good at looking after themselves ...”

“... been given to the city at the dissolution of the monasteries. A year later, on 3 March 1592, Queen Elizabeth issued a charter incorporating ‘the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity near Dublin’ as ‘the mother of a university’ with the aim of providing ‘education, training and instruction of youths and students in the arts and faculties ... that ...”

“... known as the royal numerals case, MacCormick complained, naturally enough, that the new queen, Elizabeth II, was the first Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom. Although the Court of Session in Edinburgh – the highest civil court within Scotland – rejected MacCormick’s suit, on the grounds that the style of the ...”

“... in his hospital bed becomes obsessed with rehabilitating the tarnished reputation of the dead king – sending his pet researcher off to the British Museum, calling for history books (they infuriate him; he prefers the account in historical novels) and eventually satisfying himself that Richard was not only innocent of murdering his nephews but ‘a man ...”

“... the ‘constant wife’ Imogen is a ‘tender heire’ – so disguised as a boy that her father King Cymbeline doesn’t recognise her. The disguising stage-conventions of the time (boys playing girls dressed as boys) join Elizabethan word-play and false etymologies to help Shakespeare work out stories of love’s endurance in which gender comes to seem not ...”

“... a Ring o’ Roses’, Duncan understood that he was ‘it’: ‘the Chosen One … a “King” or victim of the children’s round dance’. From there the scene shifted underground, to a huge cavern where Duncan found himself alone with a stone chair. Again he felt himself picked out as a king, but now fear ...”

“... and ‘Independent’ in the old carefree way. Three years later followed The Reign of King Pym, a masterly study of Parliamentary politics during the early years of the English Revolution which has dominated historical thinking ever since. In 1952, he published More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea, a competent but not epoch-making work. Since ...”

“... many literary academics, asked which was Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, would have answered King Lear. Modernism played its part in the formation of academic studies in literature. It’s unsurprising, then, that a note of reservation still sounds among professionals who would state the warmest admiration for the play. This takes the form of the ...”

“... of papers sold to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. And now, here’s The Pale King, this book-shaped version of the ‘long thing’, assembled by Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor on Infinite Jest, from ‘a neat stack of manuscript, 12 chapters totalling nearly 250 pages’ discovered by Wallace’s agent on the desk in his home ...”

“... which is bringing back the sound of different, personal voices and particular tales. Margaret King’s richly researched Women of the Renaissance explores the lives and works of foundlings and drudges, poets and princesses in a painstaking mesh of social, financial and legal detail. But it has to be said that the discourse of misogyny, divorcing women ...”