“... de La Mare that played a major role in the young Auden’s poetic education and was acclaimed by Elizabeth Bishop as ‘the best anthology I know of’. ‘I wish I were Mr Anon,’ de la Mare once remarked in a letter, ‘unknown, beloved, perennial, ubiquitous, in that very wide shady hat of his and dark dwelling eyes’. While the nonsense verse of ...”

“... from Franklin to Thoreau, from Edgar Allan Poe (‘The Philosophy of Composition’) to Elizabeth Bishop (‘The USA School of Writing’). Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance descends (with a clunk) from Moby-Dick; so does Norman MacLean’s A River Runs through It; but so does Hemingway’s Death in the ...”

“... historian, Bede, and that of another Anglo-Saxon monk, Cuthbert, probably a more effective bishop of Durham in death than in life. Cuthbert was also the name of the 16th-century bishop who did his best to steer the cathedral through the early Reformation: the thoughtfully traditionalist theologian and mathematical ...”

“... some fairly celebrated figures in the lesbian haut monde. A friend of mine once had dinner with Elizabeth Bishop and her lover. Another met Marguerite Yourcenar. At Yale in the 1980s one of Blakey’s best friends slept with – well, perhaps you can guess. (True – the closet case actress!) Someone else I know went to a party in a Chicago highrise ...”

“... sharply flavoured work (the Complete Poems are with difficulty bulked up to 240 pages: they make Elizabeth Bishop look lax if not garrulous); for the unusual way time – history – is precipitated in a literary life. ‘Bunting had a knack of being in the thick of things,’ Richard Burton observes in this first proper biography: it feels like a ...”

“... their own parishes and perhaps barely understood what they were dying for. An Essex servant girl, Elizabeth Folkes, aged 20, was asked what she understood about the nature of the Eucharist. Did she believe in a ‘substantial and real presence’ in the host? She answered: ‘It was a substantial lye, and a reall lye.’ She had been questioned once and let ...”

“... what James conveys himself. As you might expect, Browning loves ‘and’. Here he is writing to Elizabeth Barrett about the splendours of the Dulwich Picture Gallery: ‘those two Guidos, the wonderful Rembrandt of Jacob’s vision, such a Watteau, the triumphant three Murillo pictures, a Giorgione music-lesson group, all the Poussins with the ...”

“... done to her mother and her mother’s world which Henry’s first annulment crisis represented. Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, was equal to Katherine in stubbornness and her definite superior in intelligence: the only one of Henry’s six wives whose marriage to the king was regularly called her ‘reign’ by contemporaries. That she had a mind of her ...”

“... the Scottish Crown. He was now dependent for petty cash on his annual ‘gratuity’ from Elizabeth I, and his future was effectively mortgaged on his succession to the English throne. James notoriously showed no interest in martial matters of any kind, with the exception of the few brief and almost bloodless campaigns against rebels in Scotland ...”

“... Elizabeth Hardwick​ was wary of biographers. She called life-writing ‘a scrofulous cottage industry’, a ‘consistent fiction’ masquerading as truth. Its practitioners were necrophiliacs ‘quick in pursuit of the dead’. In her book on Herman Melville, she wrote of the ‘violent exuberance’ that accompanied his rediscovery by critics in the 1920s: ‘He was unearthed … the whole skeleton, as it were, put under the floodlights, a penetrating radar giving the bones a voluptuous rebirth ...”

“... therein none image?’ The conspicuous exception to this trend, as many readers will expect, was Elizabeth I. That Elizabeth differed sharply from her bishops (or most of them) is something we have now been taught to expect. Dr Aston does not merely make the point, but proves it with a textual analysis of the differences ...”

“... In January 1945, as she was preparing her collection North & South for publication, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her publishers to say she was worried that she had written nothing about the war: The fact that none of these poems deal directly with the war, at a time when so much war poetry is being published, will, I am afraid, leave me open to reproach ...”

“... the medieval Western Church of the Latin Rite, not least that section which remained loyal to the bishop of Rome. John O’Malley illustrates the room in his superb new history of the Council of Trent: the nave of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Trent, a bishopric in the foothills of the Dolomites. In that grand setting, seated on an amphitheatre ...”

“... resistance, and pressed the device of painful public execution into service as a powerful tool, as Elizabeth, mutatis mutandis, would do against Catholics from the 1570s onwards. Mary’s regime was well aware of the potential of such executions to alienate public opinion, and Pole and his colleagues took considered and on the whole effective steps to justify ...”

“... resources than the diagnosis of a plight. The best of Lear – and his legacy to his admirers (Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery, among others) – owes much to his willingness to turn his life’s abandonments into forms of strange abandon, his ability to shape conjurations of the blithe and the bereft:         Calico Pie         The ...”