“... to explain. Its thesis approving tyrannicide, among other things, was quite as obnoxious to Queen Elizabeth, upon whose support the Confederate Lords had to count, as it was to her successor. McFarlane cites her instruction to Morton in 1573 that Buchanan was to be ‘warned of setting forth of the booke without advise from hence touching matters therein ...”

“... autobiography the novel, we should recall that the Anglican Church was widely Calvinist under Elizabeth and James. Cervantes’ Don Quixote, not so far as I know the consequence of a revolution, echoes on into 18th-century fiction, while the great European picaresque novel with its powerfully developed religious strain was, in the hands of the Spaniard ...”

“... their details are of the pinafore-and-button-boot variety. Annie Wilson, ninth child of Enoch and Elizabeth (‘Father should have more consideration,’ her sisters used to grumble), tells of bread from the Board of Guardians and second-hand shoes, of guiding her father’s hand to sign a letter asking for work, of a mother who was ‘a beautiful ...”

“... Richard Topcliffe, chief ‘poursuivant’ or persecutor of Jesuit missionaries in the reign of Elizabeth I. Topcliffe is perhaps not much spoken of except by historians of the Catholic martyrs or close students of Donne, who mentioned him in passing but deleted the allusion. He wasn’t one of your bully-boys or guttersnipes, but the son of a Lincolnshire ...”

“... through the prism of his private life have drawn from its pages. But with the publication of Elizabeth Kendall’s Balanchine and the Lost Muse, the first twenty years of Balanchine’s life have been revisited free of his mythical guidance (‘soft focus’ might be a better way to put it) and revised. A historian and dance critic fluent in ...”

“... she saw a man whom she might save from his own flaws. If Byron was no Darcy, Annabella was no Elizabeth Bennet. In their courtship she was more of a Catherine Morland, naively in thrall to a fictional worldview and unable to see beyond it. If there was a literary parallel for the tortuous manipulations that surrounded the marriage it was Les Liaisons ...”

“... A.K. was outraged that the cinema was run by ‘American Jew financiers’, and scandalised that Elizabeth Bergner’s name ‘took precedence’ over Shakespeare’s when the Jewish actress was directed as Rosalind by her ‘nancy’ husband Paul Czinner. He can’t have been happy when Flower took the actors on an American fundraising tour in the winter of ...”

“... who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching ...”

“... the literary historian’s insistence on evolution. The first poem he has chosen, an epitaph by Elizabeth, Lady Tanfield, is notable partly because it reveals the scope of the research which has gone into the preparation of this anthology (the text is inscribed on Sir Lawrence Tanfield’s tomb in Burton Parish Church), and partly because it is so ...”

“... Romney converted to Mormonism in Lower Penwortham in 1837. Four years later he and his wife Elizabeth left England for Nauvoo, Illinois. There he built Joseph Smith a temple that was not quite completed when the prophet was shot dead by a mob. Another mob burned down Miles’s temple, and he fled Nauvoo with his family. Hounded by animals, Indians and ...”

“... Parker was raped and stabbed but survived. Taken captive along with Rachel and her son James were Elizabeth Kellog and Silas Parker’s children John and Cynthia Ann. John grew up to be a Comanche warrior, perhaps ending his life as a rancher in Mexico; Elizabeth was ransomed; Cynthia Ann became the wife of the war leader ...”

“... agree – but it’s become less plausible to rank Duncan’s work with that of Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop or the Roberts Lowell and Creeley, all of whom were born within a decade of him. I don’t imagine that even his most enthusiastic supporters would put his influence anywhere near that of John Ashbery, who seems pretty securely the major American ...”

“... formal education was useless. She put up her hair, said she was 16, and, with her older sister Elizabeth, expanded the dance school. ‘Our fame as teachers increased. We called it a new system of dancing, but in reality there was no system. I followed my fantasy and improvised, teaching any pretty thing that came into my head.’ There is a fine line ...”

“... age of forty, though by the 1510s he begins to come a little more into focus. He married his wife, Elizabeth, probably a few years after Henry’s accession in 1509. They had two daughters, Anne and Grace, and a son, Gregory, born in 1519 or 1520. At some point in the 1520s Elizabeth’s mother, Mercy (the Mistress Prior ...”

“... at court as part of the three months of revels following the marriage of James’s daughter Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine in 1613. Given that this marriage took place hard on the heels of the death of Elizabeth’s older brother, Prince Henry, The Winter’s Tale – in which the betrothal of Leontes’s daughter ...”