“... agent for the King’s Secret, to act as a courier for a secret correspondence between the Empress Elizabeth of Russia and Louis XV. He proved a great success as a spy, and equally as a diplomat, winning golden opinions all round – so much so that the Empress wanted him to take a post at her court. By this time, however, he was pining to see action as a ...”

“... like Clare, obstinate linguistic feminists like Emily Dickinson, First World writers like Elizabeth Bishop with Third World imaginations, Eastern European activists and ‘wakers-up’ like Holub and Herbert, deconstructive poets of soccer-violence Britain like Peter Reading. Opposed to them are a number of predictable villains ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... alchemist, book collector and egotist. Again like Tycho, he advised his sovereign, in his case Elizabeth I, on astrological matters, and also on such down-to-earth questions as whether to invest in voyages of exploration and how to provide timber for the British Navy; and he outlined a course of astronomical and astrological observations and calculations ...”

“... never became a Catholic monk. Michel de Castelnau, the French ambassador, did not ‘trust’ that Elizabeth could be assassinated, and his secretary, Courcelles, did not become an English mole. (I confess that I said he did, but withdrew the charge in a second account which Honan cites.) Padua was not an independent city-state. The English College at Douai ...”

“... extensive notes on his visits to Picasso over the years, his letters to the artist, and Elizabeth Cowling’s invaluable explanations and interpretations of these writings. Without her comments, we would quite often lose the point and, just as often, the meaning of these scribblings and musings, which take us from the first moments of the ...”

“... saved England from becoming yet another component of the Habsburg Empire. Her half-sister, Elizabeth I, avoided the problem by avoiding matrimony altogether. Anne’s consort, the dim Prince George of Denmark, confined himself largely to trying (and failing) to provide a successor to the Stuart crown. It is the most cogent testimony to Prince ...”

“... Singham) and African American studies (Harold Cruse). Robinson’s wife and intellectual partner, Elizabeth, began graduate studies in anthropology there, while Robinson joined the politics department, teaching on the new Black Studies programme, where the visiting speakers included Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney and James and Grace Lee ...”

“... Henry wished for his daughter. After his marriage to Anne Boleyn and the birth of their daughter, Elizabeth, Mary was sent to join the household of the infant princess. There, she was surrounded by connections of the Boleyn queen. Margaret was superfluous; curtly, Henry wrote her off as a fool. If he had trusted her once, he no longer did so. The prestige of ...”

“... enclosure, the plague, the poor law and the Essex Rebellion. The play concludes with the future Elizabeth I’s christening, during which her godfather, Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, is inspired to prophesy:In her days every man shall eat in safety,Under his own vine, what he plants; and singThe merry songs of peace to all his neighbours:God ...”

“... his letters from foreign parts don’t sound very disconsolate. A large number were addressed to Elizabeth Cameron, the young and beautiful wife of a Pennsylvania Senator. He had begun to write to her effusively, almost flirtatiously, in 1886 while travelling in Japan. Several years later he was patently love-sick. The long and detailed letters he sent her ...”

“... without her husband’s permission, but tells me why she doesn’t approve of Republican candidate Elizabeth Dole. ‘I think that God has ordained the man to be the leader and the woman should be his help and mother,’ Mary says. ‘I believe the man should hold the highest office of the United States and women do not have the God-given authority to run a ...”

“... contrast, more than half McCullough’s selection is taken from sermons preached in the reign of Elizabeth, and so covers the whole career. He provides three outstanding examples of the great set-piece Jacobean liturgical sermons, but the bulk of the selection is given over to less familiar material. This includes extracts from the Cambridge catechetical ...”

“... was, apparently, the response of one American visitor to a portrait of Edith Sitwell in the Tate. Elizabeth Bowen, herself an imposing physical presence, described Sitwell in real life as like ‘a high altar on the move’, and Virginia Woolf, on first encountering her in 1918, noted that she was ‘a very tall young woman, wearing a permanently startled ...”

“... a typical Lola-ism, since she was about as Spanish as a boil-in-the-bag paella. She was baptised Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert at St Peter’s Church in Liverpool on 16 February 1823, though she was probably born two years earlier in County Sligo. Her father, Edward Gilbert, was a soldier. Her mother, Elizabeth Oliver, was the ...”