“... with the sisters while composing his own piece on ‘Secular and Religious Motivation’. Mervyn James, a leading historian of the Tudor North whose interests made him sympathetic to Darcy’s question ‘what is a man but his promise?’, favoured aristocratic explanations. The most extreme version of the Pilgrimage, however, was contributed by Elton. Since ...”

“... Catholic. Starkey finds himself in defensive contention with Elizabeth’s Victorian biographer, Bishop Mandell Creighton, who tut-tutted his disapproval of these pretences. The implication is that Creighton was fortunate not to have had to live in the 16th century. There were also lessons in personal aggrandisement, as Elizabeth exploited the rare ...”

“... the travelling roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous crowds. Activists among the country gentry, incensed by the long prorogation of Parliament in 1675, and by then convinced that Charles II would never accept Parliament as a partner in government, had for some ...”

“... of Canterbury to enforce uniformity; he delegated the task, but to limited effect. When the bishop of London addressed a crowd, a tinker’s wife ‘unreverently hooted at him’. It was a sign of deeper disquiet. Puritan cells coalesced into networks distributing smuggled treatises and coded notes. These people were not ascetic moralists, rather they ...”

“... In his quirky but compelling book on Burke, The Great Melody, Conor Cruise O’Brien fingers James Mill in his History of British India as one of the first to put the knife in. On the question of India, Mill says, Burke neither stretched his eye to the whole of the subject, nor did he carry its vision to the bottom. He was afraid. He was not a man to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... there is the old-fashioned Calvinism of that doyen of Puritan scholars, the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher. Although the first system was less dogmatic than the second, both of them closed their adherents’ minds. Between them lay the third, altogether healthier response: the sceptical, rational Anglicanism of the Great Tew Circle, of Clarendon and his ...”

“... Law and Astrology’. Jones is best remembered now for the Banqueting House in Whitehall for James VI and I, but more consequential in many ways was the layout of Covent Garden, the first square or ‘piazza’ to break with the higgledy-piggledy of medieval London and surrounded by the first terraced houses. On one side of it he built the church of St ...”

“... from him – though she knew she shouldn’t. This confessor, Monsignor Volpi, the auxiliary bishop of Lucca, never had much time for Gemma. He seemed to regard her as a potential embarrassment. He didn’t accept that her experiences were divine graces and ordered her to terminate her ecstasies as soon as she felt them beginning. Even after the ...”

“... rewarded by John with lands. Under Henry III he continued to prosper and became a baron. His son James (c.1220-77) was a royalist too in the Barons’ Wars and became Justiciar of Ireland in 1270. Two of his sons had descendants, the elder was the ancestor of the baronial family of Audeley of Heleigh Castle, Staffordshire and Red Castle, Salop which died out ...”

“... of self-fashioning, he is an essentially Jacobean product. Sometime after the accession of King James in 1603, he gained entry to the court of the precocious young Prince of Wales. According to Bishop Fuller, ‘Prince Henry allowed him a pension and kept him for his servant. Sweetmeats and Coryate made up the last course ...”

“... Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and near the end was one poem that certainly might, in its intensity, be described as ‘short’ – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This almost token poem, a magnificent simple affair that most of us did at school, is the world’s most ...”

“... or the recollected terrors that it seeks to make good. Writing to his brother Stanislaus in 1905, James Joyce conceded: ‘I think Wordsworth of all English men of letters best deserves your word “genius”.’ Joyce was unlikely to be much taken by nature mysticism: what he may have found to admire in Wordsworth was his awareness of the momentousness that ...”

“... is still somehow Anglican, but an ecumenical Anglican. A representative Catholic equivalent is James McConica, with his specialised study English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (1965), followed by his recent excellent short general book in Oxford’s Past Masters series. For a general assessment that is longer and fuller ...”

“... interests produced a potentially subversive treatment of republicanism in Sejanus: but he became James I’s court poet, and Paulin deals fairly brusquely with Jonson as a conservative monarchist. He is represented here by ‘To Penshurst’, with a gloss based on Raymond Williams which criticises the poem for concealing its politics behind apparently ...”