“... Though England still had an heir to the throne in the ten-year-old Prince Henry, the queen, Elizabeth of York, now dangerously old at 36, immediately sought to make assurance doubly sure by conceiving again: the pregnancy was to kill her. Isabel and Ferdinand, however, wanted to maintain the alliance that the marriage of Catherine and Arthur had ...”

“... they are by birth. They cannot even, as contemporaries sometimes urged, drop part of the claim. Elizabeth of England tried to make Mary give up her claim to the English throne – understandably, since it was a better one than her own – and many of Charles Edward’s Scottish supporters urged him to settle for Scotland only. But a dynasty’s claims, if ...”

“... in the content of the painting is another matter. Lightbown is convinced that the prominence of St Elizabeth and the infant Baptist beside the throne of the Virgin and opposite the kneeling Marquess is connected with the fact that they are associated with baptism, ‘the rite that above all others separates Christians from Jews’, and he notes that they ...”

“... the institution itself. In her view, three writers only – Amber Reeves, Olivia Shakespear and Elizabeth von Arnim – did that. I can’t quite share her enthusiasm for Reeves and Shakespear, but I think she is absolutely right to describe von Arnim’s The Pastor’s Wife (1914) as the ‘most remarkable’ of the Edwardian ‘marriage ...”

“... of novelists, Jane Austen. In Pride and Prejudice, when Lady Catherine de Bourgh tries to warn Elizabeth Bennet off marrying Mr Darcy, Elizabeth replies: ‘He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter; so far we are equal.’ Lady Catherine does not answer, ‘But he is an aristocrat and you are at the bottom end of ...”

“... adorned the English throne.’ In the same year, A.L. Rowse dated the preface to The England of Elizabeth (and for Bindoff, Elizabeth was the ‘superb and matchless flower’) ‘Empire Day 1950’. It was left to W.G. Hoskins to commit the equivalent of the Great Parliament Fart of 1605 when he called his economic ...”

“... inconceivable that someone would have chosen to live with such a monster of egotism, and yet Elizabeth Christy left her husband in Greece and moved to London to be with Fowles. Warburton claims that ‘Elizabeth is at the centre of the books, as she was of John Fowles’s life. There were no publishable novels before ...”

“... a hundred pages before reaching the marriage, the coronation (splendidly described), the birth of Elizabeth. Along this road, Cardinal Wolsey falls by the wayside, the victim of his own honest miscalculation (he, too, could hardly believe what was happening) and Anne’s ruthlessness. An obscure bureaucrat called Thomas Cromwell appears on the ...”

“... who wakes just in time, which the fiction and verse of Sidney and Spenser had used to urge Queen Elizabeth to mend her ways. What the editors of The Crisis of 1614 have enterprisingly done for that year could have been attempted for a number of other occasions in early modern English history. Whether or not we call them ‘crises’, moments of heightened ...”

“... Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s​ Sonnets, a pamphlet of just 48 pages, was once the holy grail of book collectors. Copies that came to light were, to quote one biographer, ‘literally worth … more than their weight in gold’: at auction on Madison Avenue in 1930 one fetched $1250 (around $23,000 in today’s money ...”

“... is just as interested in the displeasure that Bodichon provoked in other women – Dufferin, Elizabeth Gaskell, her censorious Aunt Patty and others. Bodichon’s crime was her indifference to the conventions that so many other women relied on to secure their respectability.The subtitle does the book no favours. Robinson understands well enough that ...”

“... parish of Mountnessing in Essex in 1575, Archer grew up in a time of intense religious unease, as Elizabeth I and her ministers strove to define Protestant orthodoxy and impose it on the English people. Far from unifying the nation, the 1558 Act of Uniformity hardened divisions between Catholic diehards and Calvinist reformers, who themselves split into ...”

“... And why not? Shouldn’t the person being toasted be allowed to express her ghostly self? At Elizabeth Jane Howard’s, the voice of the dearly departed couldn’t have been more distinctive. (By the way, is the departed a victim, as in a victim of death, or merely a passive recipient? Not to sound like an ad for Center Parcs, but does one suffer ...”

“... poets of the Fifties, which marks him as originally associated with, among others, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings and Philip Larkin. No less than they, he has gone his own way and no purpose is served by hanging this historical label round his neck now. Even in its time it contributed more to publicity than to enlightenment. Robert Conquest, as editor of ...”

“... they cross the Brazilian border to buy industrial alcohol to drink. And in For Prayer and Profit, Elizabeth Colson and Thayer Scudder paint a comprehensive – and grim – picture of the alcohol-assisted decline of the rural Tonga communities in Zambia’s Gwembe District. In Zambia drink and economic decay have complemented each other over the years and ...”