“... have recently explored the development of the Church of England over the two long reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and one of Collinson’s achievements, executed with singular modesty and generosity, has been to draw their conclusions together and to set them in perspective. But the findings which count for most are the author’s own. To the ...”

“... of souls’ listing the names of strangers who have shared a prayer with him. Morgan’s mother, Elizabeth, is a more ambiguous character. Morgan dedicates the book to her, calling her the ‘bravest woman I know’, but Elizabeth comes across as a bit of a drip, prevaricating and dithering, taking lovers she doesn’t ...”

“... comments by contemporary foreign visitors – Mrs Trollope, of course, among them. The compiler, Elizabeth Aldrich, is director of the American Early Dance Institute and president of the Society of Dance History Scholars; the preface to her book is by the executive editor of Good Housekeeping. Aldrich starts with a short historical introduction called ‘The ...”

“... Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), the biggest seller of them all, is a significant exception. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was the most prolific of the sensationalists, publishing more than eighty novels, as well as poems, short stories and plays. She began to write at a time when the publishing market offered a wide variety of outlets designed to appeal to various ...”

“... almost a Breughel before its time.Quite often the beasts in the pictures try to climb out. As Elizabeth Morrison points out in her essay, it was difficult to get everything in, and artists had to collaborate with their scribes. A manuscript from St Petersburg contains a picture of a yale, a creature described by Pliny as a kind of antelope ‘the size of ...”

“... and in one sense how similar, was the experience of two debs (bridesmaids-to-be of Princess Elizabeth) who came to the islands in 1946 as guests of Nicolson’s father, Nigel (son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West). They lasted a night. Wakened by noisy rats, they screamed. Nigel would have to row them back out to a fishing boat in the ...”

“... who became his mistress, partly because of her talents on the stage. He worked closely with Elizabeth Gaskell and the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts. The distress of abused and vulnerable women moved him to pity, and he made energetic attempts to lift prostitutes out of wretchedness, with Burdett-Coutts’s help. He couldn’t tolerate women ...”

“... time an English monarch had visited since Richard II in 1399. The marriage of James’s daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, in 1613 was the first royal wedding in England since Mary Tudor’s in 1554. It cost James £93,000 and a terminal headache, since the couple’s acceptance of the crown of Bohemia from Protestant rebels in 1619 ...”

“... one think of the doctor who (probably) dissected the head of De Quincey’s three-year-old sister Elizabeth, dead of hydrocephalus – a dissection or desecration which disturbed the author profoundly, and in ways that are in turn subjected to Barrell’s imperturbable analysis. The general idea is this: the obvious core of De Quincey’s principal involute ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... novelist Bryher (Winifred Ellerman) and sixty to Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), who was Bryher’s lover. Elizabeth Bishop, a favourite in later years, received more than two hundred, over a period of almost forty years. Faced with such abundance the editors have had to make severe choices, and have occasionally and understandably made cuts in letters they did ...”

“... with his family, especially with his mother and with his proposed bride, his foster-sister Elizabeth, are also spelt out through his dreams, and this material has tempted some modern readers to conclude that the novel’s, and Frankenstein’s, other interests are all a distraction from the reality he is neglecting, the well-being and happiness of ...”

“... tend to accept their condition in life as given – like the dogs whose experience of the world Elizabeth Marshall Thomas attempted to share, imagining it as utterly free of boredom ... the hypothetical inhabitants of a world without the notion of boredom – they’re not dogs, after all – invoke categories other than those of feeling to assess their ...”

“... his response to the felt pressures of both private readers (notably, though not exclusively, Elizabeth Barrett) and public critics. It is this element of ‘interaction’, Woolford argues, which represented, in Browning’s own eyes, ‘his revision of Romantic poetics, and stimulated his progressive revision of poetic form’ (‘progressive’ here ...”