“... 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 ...”

“... of Welsh and English. The mistake which Pope Pius V made in excommunicating and deposing Queen Elizabeth was one reason Pius XII was reluctant to take a firmer line against Adolf Hitler. Sir Philip Sidney’s state funeral was delayed until February 1587, perhaps to provide a ceremonial counterpoint to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. In Elizabethan ...”

“... In​ Olive, Again, her seventh book, Elizabeth Strout returns to her character Olive Kitteridge, a maths teacher in small-town Maine. A number of the chapters in Strout’s first, eponymous book about the character had already appeared in print as short stories before the novel’s publication in 2008, so that Olive Kitteridge is really half a novel, half a collection of stories; Olive, Again and most of Strout’s other books have the same hybrid form ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Anne Royal, to the Downs in September 1619. He had previously held a household position under Elizabeth I; travelled from La Coruña to Valladolid as part of the delegation sent by James VI and I to ratify an Anglo-Spanish alliance in 1605; commanded an expedition to Guiana in 1610, enthusiastically supported by the imprisoned Sir Walter Raleigh; and ...”

“... old Christian prohibition on usury. Henry VIII legalised it; Edward VI recriminalised it; since Elizabeth I restored her father’s financial initiative in 1571 – albeit with a cap of 10 per cent – lending and borrowing money at interest has stealthily metamorphosed from rarity to commonplace, from commonplace to norm and from norm to something like a ...”

“... with low-relief images of staple subjects for tourist tat: a Routemaster bus, a Union Jack, Queen Elizabeth I, Big Ben, Tower Bridge and so forth. His response to the roughly worked surfaces and cloddish weight of the bronzes he has chosen – the almost featureless head by William Turnbull, for example, or the alien-like figure standing on three prongs by ...”

“... horn of the Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor.’ This was not Elizabeth I’s only narwhal tusk. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Raleigh’s half-brother, presented her with a gem-encrusted narwhal tusk worth £10,000 (enough, at the time, to buy and staff a small castle). It was, he told her, a ‘sea-unicorn’. Gilbert’s ...”