“... 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 ...”

“... Wagner-Martin, a highly respected scholar of American literature who teaches at the University of North Carolina, was bewildered by the hostile reception in Britain of her biography of Sylvia Plath, published in 1987. Not only had she run into major conflicts with the Plath estate, she explains in her preface to Telling Women’s Lives, but some critics saw ...”

“... Thomas Seymour, the Lord Protector’s brother, and his marital designs on the 15-year-old Lady Elizabeth, the future (Protestant) queen. She is disliked by the Lord Protector, who favours her elder half-sister, Lady Mary, the future (Catholic) queen. William Cecil, a rising royal secretary, is protective towards ...”

“... the reality: £4 billion over budget for Crossrail is a parsimonious bargain for the rebranded Elizabeth Line. This money is flighty, but it is very serious. It maps the territory where we might be able to pick up the threads of the General Theory of Everything. A lot of people are talking, releasing statements, providing updates, playing themselves in ...”

“... place behind the scenes to defend England and promote its interests. Researching his biography of Elizabeth I’s chief adviser Lord Burghley, Stephen Alford discovered a scribbled memo from 1562, written while the queen lay dangerously ill with smallpox, ordering the privy council to appoint a successor in the event of her death. ...”

“... of an equally penniless Devonian such as Ralegh. But one may be more sensitive to these nuances north of the Tweed. More serious, perhaps, is the omission of any reference to the most important Ralegh discovery in recent years, Mark Nicholls’s publication in 1995 of the prosecution summary of the evidence in the Main Plot trial of 1603. This is not the ...”

“... John Major’s vision of Britain is history by now: a unitary state north and south of the Tweed, secured by consent, subject to one monarch and funded by a non-tartan tax system. When Major first published his views, however, in the punningly titled Historia Maioris Britanniae (1521), his innovativeness upset fellow Scots ...”

“... of the ‘Lewis’ Restaurant, Main Street, Fairmount, Indiana or the Lincoln Triplex Cinema, North Arlington, New Jersey. The light is very particular in these small-town landscapes, gathered in the book Hometowns. The book is his favourite format and he has published many: Paterson, Lincoln, Hometowns, Seacoast Maine, Stone Walls, Grey Skies: A Vision ...”

“... events were the Reformation, when it lost its monks and lands and found its finances insecure, and Elizabeth I’s subsequent decision to make it a Royal Peculiar. This put it outside the jurisdiction of the Church of England, answerable only to the monarch, and left its dean and chapter in charge of its affairs. Since then, royals have turned up for ...”

“... that would strengthen Scotland’s ‘auld alliance’ with France and second to neutralise the north while Henry’s war against France was prosecuted. In the event, his military campaign failed, though it’s possible that he did succeed in laying some foundations during the wars of the 1540s for the Scottish Reformation of 1560 and growing co-operation ...”

“... had been impressed enough to recruit him as a scientific assistant on his voyage towards the North Pole in 1773. Two years later, Irving’s new scheme called for black slaves to plant provisions and haul mahogany and logwood in a colony on the Mosquito Coast. Equiano agreed to buy slaves in the West Indies and to assure them that, in spite of the ...”

“... in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the border. Wormald and other historians have done much to establish James’s political agility and challenge the homophobia and xenophobia that skewed interpretations of him alive and dead. But the caricature of a weak king drooling over his ...”

“... from the trade of archer. In January 1960 Evelyn Waugh declared that he and Betjeman, along with Elizabeth Bowen and L.P. Hartley, had lost their edge as writers. In these often maudlin years, Betjeman’s openness is a great asset to his biographer just as it was a considerable source of material to the poet. The flyleaf of the Collected Poems (1958) states ...”

“... Isles to Ferdinando I, grand duke of Tuscany, whose concern to see a non-Habsburg nominee succeed Elizabeth I prompted him to send Wotton on a mission to Scotland to warn James VI of a credible poisoning plot. Since Wotton’s connection with Essex made him an outlaw, he couldn’t travel through England, instead taking the ‘horse-killing route’ through ...”

“... and had had nearly thirty of her poems published in literary journals or book collections, Elizabeth Bishop, then 28, admitted in a letter to Moore: ‘I scarcely know why I persist at all. It is really fantastic to place so much on the fact that I have written a half-dozen phrases that I can still bear to reread without too much ...”