“... this what we are to call Coetzee’s third-person, present-tense autobiographies, for instance, or Elizabeth Costello’s lectures? – but it has implications for all the labels used in literary criticism. Take the designation ‘late Modernist’, which David Attwell, one of Coetzee’s most astute early champions, applied to his fiction in the 1990s. Though ...”

“... fleet consisting of an aircraft carrier and supporting vessels). The aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, the largest warship ever built for the British navy, is due to come into service in 2021 if not before; Williamson sees it entering the South China Sea in a matter of years.If these plans are realised, Britain’s naval prowess will be greater than at ...”

“... was good on anecdotes though not quite so strong on truth) recorded that he once got one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour up against a tree. She protested with ‘Will you undoe me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter! At last as the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher, she cryed in the ecstasy, Swisser-Swatter ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and rose to the unwelcome challenge with genuine heroism. The best thing he ever did was to marry Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. She is usually said to have been the making of him, and so perhaps she was. The famous words which his brother used in his Abdication broadcast – that he found it ‘impossible to carry the heavy burdens of responsibility ... without the ...”

“... was made safe in Norfolk and Suffolk, if not so far in Europe. And then, at Norwich on 21 August, Elizabeth was for the first time publicly celebrated (by the poet Thomas Churchyard) as a Virgin Queen. The significance of this little piece of provincial theatre, a proposal not to marry, relates to the master-card in the 1578 strategy of appeasement: a royal ...”

“... Do novelists come nicer than Elizabeth Taylor? Her mother died of politeness – she developed appendicitis over Christmas, and didn’t want to interrupt the doctor’s holiday – but rather than renounce good manners on the spot, her biographer Nicola Beauman writes, Taylor ‘cared about good manners very much indeed’ to the end of her days ...”

“... they bolted for the safety of Revolutionary Paris. The party included the Duke’s mistress, Lady Elizabeth Foster, and his four young children, two of them by Lady Elizabeth, whose company Georgiana ‘for reasons best known to herself ... loved more than that of any living soul’. Georgiana’s mother, Countess ...”

“... Like most poets, Elizabeth Jennings, who died two years ago, wrote too many poems. She was careless about her output, sending Michael Schmidt, her editor at Carcanet, ‘sacks’ of manuscript work to sift through and make into a collection. Even he seems occasionally to have lost track. His sympathetic and shrewd introduction records that her own favourite among her poems was ‘Fountains’, but there isn’t a poem called that ...”

“... powerful and in some ways admirable and unusual, manages to break through. She was born Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in August 1900, the youngest daughter and ninth of ten children of Lord and Lady Glamis. When she was four her father inherited the earldom of Strathmore and she became Lady Elizabeth. The Strathmores had ...”

“... Embassy Paris 8, France. Date: December 28, 1955 To: Director FBI From: Legat, Paris Subject: ELIZABETH WINIFRED B. KELLY                nee Boger, aka                Mrs Eugene Curran Kelly,                Betsy Blair                SECURITY MATTER – C                Re: Bulet ...”

“... at the crippling expense of his father-in-law Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, and preserved in the public imagination by Thomas Lant’s pictorial roll, was the grandest accorded to an English subject before Nelson: a determined show of strength by the forward Protestant party to which Sidney had belonged and in whose cause he ...”

“... to each and arranging them in three sections: ‘The Royal Opposition’ (Queen Anne, Princess Elizabeth and Arbella Stuart), ‘Rewriting Patriarchy’ (the Countess of Bedford, Anne Clifford and Rachel Speght) and ‘Literary Revisions’ (Elizabeth Cary, Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Wroth). Each chapter contains a short ...”

“... Mary’s successor by Act of Parliament, her detested Protestant half-sister. Philip knew that Elizabeth, as the focus for religious and political dissent, had to be handled with extreme caution, even though in the Habsburg view she might well be preferable to the other claimant to the English throne, Mary Queen of Scots, whose claim ran from Henry VII via ...”

“... Elizabeth Smart was browsing one day between the wars in the bookshops of the Charing Cross Road. Young, blonde and original, unclaimed by her Ottawa upbringing or her mother’s social hopes, Smart came to lean against those London bookshelves as if they alone contained all the answers. That day, she drew her finger over a line of volumes, took one down and read the poems where she stood, deciding by the last page that the author was the man she was put on earth to marry ...”