“... an MP and by 1593 had been elected speaker of the House of Commons. Within two years he had become Elizabeth’s solicitor general and then her attorney general, a post in which he achieved celebrity as a foul-tempered prosecutor, first of the Earl of Essex, then of Sir Walter Raleigh (‘Thou viper … thou hast an English face but a Spanish heart!’) and of ...”

“... China, and it also informed American artists of colour such as Jacob Lawrence, Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett (a genealogy traced in a superb exhibition curated by Buchloh with Michelle Harewood for the Reina Sofía in 2022). At moments one wonders why Kollwitz was embraced so readily: sometimes her workers appear degraded and her crowds look ...”

“... tightrope-walker and trickster, but for a time he serves at the court of the ‘winter queen’, Elizabeth (wife of Friedrich and daughter of James VI of Scotland), who’s a theatre enthusiast and consoles Shakespeare on the death of his son Hamlet. (‘Hamnet,’ he corrects her.) Shakespeare turns up again in The Director when Pabst is first pushed to ...”

“... Let me start with that sad day in March 1603, when our beloved sovereign of blessed memory, Elizabeth, died … I was concerned about my hon. friend’s attack on the Victorian age, which was one of the finest ages in British history, when most employers were benevolent, kindly, good … I know that sometimes I bore the House with historical ...”

“... to revive a dormant but by no means extinct affair with the American socialite and activist Elizabeth Wade White. A further and quite possibly decisive discharge of libido seemed to be in the offing. The deal was that at the beginning of September Elizabeth would move in with Valentine for a month while Sylvia, having ...”

“... living on my nerves. I would wish the next days out of my life.’ The novel tells the story of Elizabeth Reegan, the second wife of a sergeant, who is slowly dying of cancer in a police barracks in the Irish midlands. It would not have been lost on McGahern’s father that the disease that killed John McGahern’s mother had been given to his ...”

“... wife, whose name has never been recorded, had died, leaving him four children. His second wife, Elizabeth, courageous and pious like his first, presented a petition to secure his release. Angered by the callous attitude of one of the Justices of the Peace, and by the mockery of several bystanders, she denounced the proceedings: ‘Because he is a ...”

“... when Alexander Korda’s film Fire over England was released in 1937. It stars Flora Robson as Elizabeth I, and as the opening titles roll the voiceover sets the scene: ‘the free people of a small island’ defy the tyranny of a Continental power and ‘a woman guides and inspires them.’ Robson, firm of jaw and bristling with double-decker ruffs and ...”

“... more curvy – I am of course referring to her face, on which, unlike Dietrich, Garbo or indeed Elizabeth Taylor (whom she saw as a rival), there isn’t a single straight line. There is no flattening wash over this face. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly couldn’t stand her, had to concede that every time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she ...”

“... unknown tongue. Latin could get you an international reputation there, as achieved for instance by Elizabeth Jane Weston, ‘The Maid of England’, whose poetry – on her emotions, her life, on poverty and on the floods in Prague – won her a European reputation before and after she died at the age of 30, having borne seven children. In a list of major ...”

“... What must Dylan make of this meaningless buzz? Robert Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett that he had never lacked ‘a real set of good hearty praisers’: ‘No – what I laughed at in my “gentle audience” is a sad trick the real admirers have of admiring at the wrong place – enough to make an apostle swear. That does make ...”

“... of the poem’s vocabulary. Public music is a wonderful subject (Rimbaud’s ‘A la Musique’, Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress’, Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March), public music as a backdrop to private musings better still. Eastbourne, (August) Bank Holiday – ‘the English ferragosto’, Montale ...”

“... or ‘Babylonish dialect’ that each artist makes his own. On Dickens, on Joyce, on Elizabeth Bishop and John Betjeman – perhaps the best essays – he has things to say both brilliant and new. But he wouldn’t have said them, paradoxically, had he not been a critic capable of mistakes. In all his essays he brings virtues easy to class as ...”

“... Taking up Connolly’s plea for state support to the writer, Orwell demanded £1000 a year, Elizabeth Bowen £3500, while Robert Graves could only suggest ‘living off friends’, and V.S. Pritchett, with sturdy virtue, opined that ‘the failures of overwork are fewer than the failures of idleness.’ Evelyn Waugh, on the whole in kindly ...”

“... the sacred encounters of his imagination that a poet’s impulse to write a poem arises.’ The Elizabeth Bishop who likened knowledge to water, ‘dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free’, would probably have agreed. So the introduction is an obvious disaster; the 55 poets, you feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets ...”