“... tasks of scholarship before which most of us simply blench. Add to Browning’s letters those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who lived 22 years less but corresponded twice as much in a hand half as legible; add to that all the letters to both the Brownings which can be found: and the task grows mountainous, vertiginous, seemingly impossible. Philip Kelley ...”

“... mishandled Warwick, showering him with rewards early in the reign, delegating huge powers to him north of the Trent and in Calais, then clipping his wings. Warwick learned to tolerate the bluff William Hastings, a Leicestershire squire whom Edward made his principal fixer and chief pimp, but was then blindsided by the king’s clandestine marriage to the ...”

“... I was told by the English Heritage tour guide that James VI of Scotland was ‘the person whom Elizabeth I had chosen to be her successor’. Only days after Elizabeth’s death aged 69 in March 1603, Henri IV of France’s ambassador, the comte de Beaumont, similarly reported from London ‘the immediate election and ...”

“... of 1986,’ and outlines a programme: presentation of the Domesday facsimile to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Courts of Justice (Her Majesty will not lack for Domesday Books by the end of the year); jousting in Regents Park and Norwich; Domesday weeks in London, Winchester, Norwich and other historic towns; traditional mayor-making ceremony in ...”

“... way.‘A great gale hit us broadside on,’ Francisco de Cuéllar recalled. It shot out of the north-west ‘with the waves reaching the sky’. De Cuéllar had seen nothing like it. ‘The cables could not hold and the sails could not be set. We found ourselves driven ashore on a beach of very fine sand.’ Within an hour, ‘all three ships were smashed ...”

“... domain of Anletār’. It began a correspondence between Sultan Murad III and the most renowned Elizabeth, most sacred queen, and noble prince of the most mighty worshippers of Jesus, most wise governor of the causes and affairs of the people and family of Nazareth, cloud of most pleasant rain, and sweetest fountain of nobleness and virtue, lady and heir of ...”

“... a ‘general idea’ – to celebrate the Queen’s visit by reviving the masques with which Elizabeth I was greeted at Cambridge in 1564 and at Oxford in 1566 and 1592. Would Empson assist in the creation of a new masque by ‘writing such parts of it as would be spoken or sung’? The vocal part should be in English and not Latin, Whittaker ...”

“... superiority took deep root. It even permeates letters I have read in provincial archives in the north of England in which happy British women congratulate themselves on having escaped the fate of their benighted sisters in the East. It is precisely this comforting fiction that Margaret Hunt explodes in her impressive new synthesis, Women in 18th-Century ...”

“... at one of the most important peace conferences of the Tudor age, which took place a year after Elizabeth I’s death at Somerset House in London. They had succeeded in ending three decades of cold and hot war between Reformed Protestant powers and the Spanish Habsburgs, confirming in the process the independence of the Protestant Northern Netherlands, and ...”

“... intermittently. There were two main flashpoints: the perpetually war-torn Italian peninsula, and North-West Europe. Over the years, the struggle between England, France and the Habsburg Low Countries had led to a series of shifting alliances, and both Habsburg and French agents were active in England, seeking to pull sympathies one way or the other. United ...”

“... professional level. As a young man he danced four nights running at Holyrood Palace with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, something he says he had ‘entirely forgotten’ until he found in his papers a ‘Dear Ludo’ letter from Princess Elizabeth thanking him for his wedding present. (Old men forget, but this is ...”

“... the 1560s to the present time. I had not fully appreciated, for example, the extent to which Queen Elizabeth, both personally and through her ministers, agents and ambassadors, manipulated and controlled the affairs of Scotland ... In 1603, when James VI became James I of England, Scotland lost her resident monarch. Little more than a century later, ‘a ...”

“... no memory of my father, who was a local historian, talking or writing about it. The landscape of north Wexford, where I was born, is dotted with memorials to 1798, but there is nothing, as far as I know, at Scullabogue. Its memory was erased from what a child could learn about 1798. It was a complication in our glorious past, and it was essential for our ...”

“... From the moment he died in April 1590, Francis Walsingham, principal secretary to Elizabeth I, has been the subject of competing myths. Catholics greeted the demise of a relentless opponent with relief and applause, and circulated lurid providential stories about the appalling stench that came from his corpse, which allegedly poisoned one of his pall-bearers ...”

“... a chunk of his personal fortune getting himself elected to the US Senate for his home state of North Carolina, though not before he had enhanced that fortune by deploying the story of his son’s death during his closing remarks in a case against a swimming-pool company whose suction cleaner had disembowelled a young girl, helping him to secure a $25 ...”