“... as those who have discerned this rebellion contriving from (if not before) the death of Queen Elizabeth’. One wonders what he would have made of Stone’s lectures, in which we were taken back to the reign of Henry VIII, and learned as much about population movements and the educational system as about religion and politics. It was the total history of ...”

“... is imprisoned during a revolt of his subjects, and his betrothed, the ‘fair and gentle’ Lady Elizabeth, elects to share his captivity. After an idyllic period, singing, as it were, like birds in the cage, they become weakened and disillusioned by hardship. Bargaining for release, Lady Elizabeth does her best to seduce ...”

“... become orthodox to assert that James I tied the theatre much more closely to the state than had Elizabeth I, increasing its prestige while decreasing its independence. Barroll demolishes this hypothesis, systematically and irresistibly. James’s own attitude to plays remained dismissive; the social status of actors could hardly have been lower; the rise in ...”

“... of his life. He had affairs again at Harvard, where he went in 1932. But he came to agree with Elizabeth Boody, an economic historian whom he met there soon after he arrived, that he’d come to lead ‘a ridiculous life’. In 1937, they married, and she sustained him. He died in her country house in Connecticut in 1950. As an economist, his reputation ...”

“... between Anglicanism and Catholicism, and paint rather good genre pictures, the chief of which, St Elizabeth of Hungary, is now in Johannesburg. For Sale is a Tate Gallery postcard, though not itself on display. In effect he was to jilt Christina, though the fiction was kept up that she broke off the engagement. He thought of becoming a Jesuit priest, but gave ...”

“... ended fatally. Norton found ‘one of the most tragic cases’ concerned a maidservant called Elizabeth Abbott, who in 1624 turned to neighbours for help again and again against the beatings ‘with smale lyne or whip corde ... sometimes with fish hooks attached’ to which she was subjected by her master and mistress and ‘other servants acting at their ...”

“... people’. For Paglia, only remote and glamorous icons of pop culture like Madonna and Elizabeth Taylor (of whom she once collected 599 pictures) are spared this resentment, and courted from afar.Although Paglia cites Harold Bloom and Milton Kessler (her professor at Harpur College in the Sixties) as intellectual mentors, and Oscar Wilde as her ...”

“... King’s fate a more personal message. ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’ the ageing Queen Elizabeth demanded, mindful of her fallen favourite, the Earl of Essex, and his forlorn attempt to rally support for his claim to the throne by staging the tragedy of Richard’s fall ‘forty times in open streets and houses’. The play Essex performed was, in ...”

“... encounter in St Luke’s Gospel between the expectant Virgin Mary and her sixty-year-old cousin Elizabeth, improbably pregnant, in the days before IVF, with John the Baptist. The Visitation is the Second Joyful Mystery of the rosary. For those who grew up in Catholic Ireland, it was also a cautionary tale: if it happened to them, it could happen to ...”

“... French and Indian troops down the Ohio River when he came across a sulphurous marsh where, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it, ‘hundreds – perhaps thousands – of huge bones poked out of the muck, like spars of a ruined ship.’ The captain and his soldiers had no idea what sort of creatures the bones had supported, whether any of their living kin were ...”

“... known as the royal numerals case, MacCormick complained, naturally enough, that the new queen, Elizabeth II, was the first Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom. Although the Court of Session in Edinburgh – the highest civil court within Scotland – rejected MacCormick’s suit, on the grounds that the style of the ...”

“... corrupt law enforcement agencies in the 1940s and 1950s. Describing the last hours of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short – the so-called ‘Black Dahlia’, whose torture-murder was to stand proxy, in Ellroy’s psyche, for his mother’s murder – Webb writes: ‘Dozens of men must have observed her, for she spent the time waiting near the phone booths and she ...”

“... in earlier scholarship on Haywood, the Rev. Valentine Haywood, a hapless clergyman whose wife Elizabeth absconded in 1721, prompting him to advertise for leads in a London newspaper. This Elizabeth, it seems, was someone else. More important than the biographical red herrings are the enduring assumptions that flow from ...”

“... In 1579, John Stubbs had his right hand cut off for writing a work opposing the marriage of Elizabeth I to a French nobleman. Elizabeth herself urged that the printers of the anti-Anglican Marprelate tracts should be subjected to torture. In 1663, a London printer who published a pamphlet which argued that the monarch ...”

“... play The Blue Bird. The work starred Jane Fonda as Night, Ava Gardner as Luxury, and Elizabeth Taylor as Queen of Light and Maternal Love. You can see where the problems might arise, even if Maeterlinck was not a bit of a problem to start with. It was a Soviet-American coproduction, partly shot in what was then Leningrad, where Harrison ...”