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“... natural environment of favourites, which, initially, he did, unlike his dear friend and idol Sir Philip Sidney, with whom he fought at Zutphen and whose widow, after Zutphen, he married. In those early days, it was said that nobody was near the Queen but my lord of Essex. ‘At night my lord is at cardes or one game or an other with her, [so] that he ...”

“... the mythical ruler El Dorado, so called because he was believed to be anointed with gold dust. Sir Philip Sidney (for whom Ralegh composed an elegy) said that nature’s ‘world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden’. In Ralegh’s case the imaginary and the literal search for gold were more or less indistinguishable, although he probably did want ...”

“... book is the best of a string of recent works which have argued that Francis Bacon, Erasmus, Sir Philip Sidney (to name only the most prominent examples) were primarily concerned with negotiating a space for themselves within the Court by exploiting complex relationships between power, manuscript circulation, print and patronage. I am not convinced that ...”

“... as diverse as Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (1592), Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, His Fall (1603-5), Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) and John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice (1632). According to Perry, this is in large part because the favourite made conveniently visible a central problem with the entire institution of personal monarchy, that of ...”

“... allows only subsidiary places to the strenuous translation of Psalms by Sir Thomas Wyatt or Sir Philip Sidney (the ‘Sidneian Psalms’ acclaimed by a poem of Donne) or Milton. Yet Donne himself, who worried whether poetry was equal to the expression of divine truth unless a divine spirit directed it, maintained that the ‘tropes and figures’ of ...”

“... present awards to each other; it seeps into passages of Caroline Moorehead’s biography of Sidney Bernstein. ‘In every field, whether art, medicine, the sciences or technology,’ she begins, ‘there are a few figures who stand out, not only for their personal achievements, but for the way they always seem a little in advance of what is about to ...”

“... and Bovary, real historical figures recast in fiction, such as Goethe, Pastor Oberlin and Philip II, Goethe’s and Thomas Mann’s Lotte, Christa Wolf’s Kassandra, Prince Rama, Rushdie’s Gibreel Farishta, Humbert Humbert, Dorothea Brooke and Mr Causaubon, the Emperor in his non-existent new clothes and Calvino’s Non-Existent Knight. With those ...”

“... M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence [sic] Sterne; generosity indeed to double the number!’ A list so nakedly daft obviates ...”

“... satire and romantic tragedy. It was such violations of classical decorum that so affronted Philip Sidney and caused him to rail against his contemporaries’ taste for ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’. Shakespeare liked nothing better than to tease or confound his audience’s expectations: he renders the tragic effect of Othello even more cruel by ...”

“... It’s unlikely that Sidney Webb features in Tony Blair’s pantheon of political heroes. It would, in fact, be difficult to think of a less likely match for Tony and Cherie than Sidney and Beatrice. Yet, after almost a century, the Webbs’ thinking about local government – their disdain for civic initiative and zeal for state uniformity – still appears to influence Labour Party policy ...”

“... learned to read. It had its significance in the high culture, was the Bible read and known by Philip and Mary Sidney, Donne and Shakespeare, and one does not have to dig deep to find these writers’ explicit use of it. Of even more significance, however, was its contribution to the development of independent thought ...”

“... The last letter​ Philip Larkin wrote was to Kingsley Amis on 21 November 1985. He was too ill to hold the pen himself and dictated it to be typed and signed by his secretary at the Brynmor Jones Library in Hull. He told Amis he was going into hospital that day for more tests – ‘only tests, but of course they are looking for something, and I bloody well hope they don’t find it ...”

“... imagination is whatever works.’ The novel is, in the old sense, a Defence of Poetry – like Sir Philip Sidney’s in the Renaissance, and Shelley’s in the early 19th century. And like theirs, it is premised on fiction’s paradoxical truth. In the first book he published after the fatwa, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Rushdie echoed ...”

“... Philip Larkin, we are told, left instructions in his will that certain of his writings had to be destroyed, unread. His executors obeyed: the word is that several of the poet’s notebooks, or journals, are now ashes. Did Larkin expect to be so obeyed? Or did he imagine that perhaps someone, somehow, might take a peek at the material before it reached the flames? And if such a thought did cross his mind, why didn’t he destroy the stuff himself? He must have known that, by not doing so, he was bequeathing at least the possibility of a dilemma ...”