“... and he may well devise other ways of dealing with the problematics of fiction. In his novel Elizabeth Costello he uses the figure of a distinguished Australian novelist, a rather weary 60-year-old, who travels the world picking up prizes and giving lectures on many subjects of interest to Coetzee: ‘The Lives of Animals’, ‘The Humanities in ...”

“... did); William Carlos Williams’s Rutherford home (where the famous icebox was, they point out); Elizabeth Bishop’s last residence on Boston Harbor; the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, which reassembled Marianne Moore’s Brooklyn living space on its own third floor. I’m pretty sure I can tell which poets the authors are really keen on ...”

“... new lessons from ancient hunters and herdsmen. Following domestication, write James Serpell and Elizabeth Paul, religious and secular ideologies reinforced ‘hierarchical notions of human separateness and superiority’, and the idea of animals as somehow equal with humans gave way to the world described in the Book of Genesis. Evolutionists and ...”

“... an uncommon name, and the playwright’s direct line died out in 1670 with his granddaughter Lady Elizabeth Barnard). The picture came into the family soon after the First World War, kindly provided by someone who couldn’t bear the idea that a modern-day William Shakespeare – whom she met, moreover, in her adopted home county of Warwickshire ...”

“... a luxury retirement village in the Kent countryside. Every Thursday they meet to solve cold cases. Elizabeth (who will be played by Helen Mirren in the forthcoming movie) is a retired MI6 agent, Joyce (Celia Imrie) a former nurse, Ron (Pierce Brosnan) a one-time union organiser and Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley) an ex-psychiatrist. Their former careers give them a ...”

“... title, like the Most Serene Republic of San Marino. Its head of state is your very own Queen Elizabeth II (though she exercises authority on Jersey as the Duke of Normandy). The local currency is the Jersey pound, convertible on a one-to-one basis with its mainland namesake. In fact, there’s nothing much that would make you sit up and take notice of ...”

“... knew to their cost. The Society of 1707 was not the first. Another society was founded under Elizabeth I. But her successor, James I, ‘took a little Mislike’ to it and it fizzled out. Charles I made the antiquary Robert Cotton close his famous library, thinking it seditious. Suspected at various times of anti-Stuart sympathies, closet ...”

“... representation that has more in common with the head of Alexander the Great on a coin, with Queen Elizabeth in any number of portraits, or Queen Victoria in the statues that stand on plinths in squares and parks all over her erstwhile empire than with a portrait like Sargent’s of Henry James, which encourages you to look for evidence of personality in ...”

“... troublingly close to that of James Stuart, the heir presumptive when the play was written. Once Elizabeth I finally died, Shakespeare would be a subject of the son of Mary Queen of Scots, who, like Gertrude, had married the apparent murderer (Bothwell) of her first husband (Darnley); and therefore Hamlet, while unable to stop obsessing about what that ...”

“... of all women whose creative work was allowed to lapse unexamined in a man’s world.But when Elizabeth Miller, born in 1907 and comfortably reared in Poughkeepsie, first arrived in New York and attracted public notice, she did it by typifying the post-Great War flapper, a new creature who threatened old norms of female being and behaviour. Fashion for ...”

“... of the essence, but the historic moment was also opportune. In the decades since Crawfie, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret’s governess Marion Crawford, was unceremoniously cut off by the royal family for publishing her recollections, The Little Princesses (1950), attitudes have not so much changed as gone into reverse. From the occasional discreet ...”

“... contaminate. That’s the argument of ‘Lesson 6: The Problem of Evil’, part of Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, a book that is probably easiest to categorise as non-non-fiction. This is the other side of the postmodernist coin (the coin that calls all value into question). As well as writing novels that contain a character sharing some of the author’s ...”

“... therein none image?’ The conspicuous exception to this trend, as many readers will expect, was Elizabeth I. That Elizabeth differed sharply from her bishops (or most of them) is something we have now been taught to expect. Dr Aston does not merely make the point, but proves it with a textual analysis of the differences ...”

“... the stage. Much of this documentary evidence is taken from Pepys’s Diary, and Roberts produces Elizabeth Pepys as one of his star witnesses. Acknowledging that reports of her critical reactions are ‘thinly and obscurely spread’ throughout the Diary, he makes a brave attempt at organising them into a coherent scheme. However, he seems oddly insensitive ...”

“... But in passing, Muggeridge noted that aristocrats with any pretension to style found Queen Elizabeth II ‘dowdy, frumpish and banal’. The epithets – and Muggeridge’s disloyalty abroad – were picked up by the English press and he joined Altrincham in the pillory. They received some 2200 letters, the majority anonymous and vile – many of them ...”