“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In the royal numerals case of 1953 – which concerned whether the new queen should style herself Elizabeth II in Scotland, where there had never been an Elizabeth I – the Scottish judge Lord Cooper made the controversial pronouncement that the unlimited sovereignty of parliament was an exclusively English concept, which ...”

“... life there, yet turned her back on the place fairly determinedly in her fiction. Her real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh, and she was the daughter of Colin MacKintosh, a fruiterer who had pulled himself up into prosperity and respectability from humble beginnings. His parents were ‘illiterate Gaelic-speaking crofters’; his father came to Inverness to work ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Powell’s account, nor does he quote the memorably bitchy but somehow reassuring judgment of Elizabeth Bowen that Jean Connolly was really ‘a big soft crook’. Without extenuating her husband, it suggests that she was not really cast for the role of victim. He liked women who were good at looking after him, but also good at looking after themselves ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”