“... backed up by penalties; respectability by inviting royal protectors to become figureheads. (Queen Elizabeth II is the present Grand Patroness.) The year 1717 marked the foundation of the British Grand Lodge, out of four merged London lodges, and in the course of the century the rituals took permanent shape around the legend of King Solomon’s Temple, while ...”

“... general reading public. So much for Europe, and for the few American writers – Lowell, Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop – who share European values. But American literature, on the whole, is – to a degree Bayley thinks perverse – internalised; it lives by starving itself, cultivates impoverishment, blankness and homelessness. It doesn’t tell stories: ‘we ...”

“... that ‘the graph of female progress, far from ascending in a straight line from the death of Elizabeth to the accession of Queen Anne, rose during the middle decades’ of the century, only ‘to dip again with the restoration of the old order in 1660’. From that ‘cyclical pattern’ Fraser draws a contemporary lesson. Were vigilance now to ...”

“... the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, talks about the hot weather and the visit to Paris of Princess Elizabeth, and goes into some detail about two women. One is Dolorès, about whom he had previously written that she loved him ‘à faire peur’. He describes their affair as ‘stationnaire’, and explains his violent reaction when she writes to tell him that ...”

“... Lawrence’s maxim ‘we shed our sicknesses in books’ is usually applied to Sons and Lovers, where he disposed of his nearly fatal over-attachment to his mother. But Women in Love is a cathartic novel too, though here the sickness is less easy to cure. The sickness itself is obvious enough: it is misanthropy, a continuous rage at almost everyone around ...”

“... further explanation of, say, quantitative verse. Personally I should have welcomed much more about Elizabeth Daryush, née Bridges, the poet’s elder daughter. Her poetry is not unknown; on the contrary Roy Fuller devoted an entire Oxford Lecture to it. But in this connection – she and her father worked together on metre – more could have been said ...”

“... who appear in Read. I particularly missed some of the Northern women writers such as Charlotte Elizabeth, Amanda McKittrick Ros, Frances Browne and Anne Crone, whose varieties of Unionism and feminism would have been intriguingly disruptive of the meta-narrative. Northern writing is otherwise well-represented. Tom Paulin edits a section on ‘Northern ...”

“... ruler still presented an imaginative challenge to her subjects. In a poem on the wedding, even Elizabeth Barrett worked to subsume the queen in the woman: ‘Esteem that wedded hand less dear for sceptre than for ring,/And hold her uncrowned womanhood to be the royal thing.’ Landseer’s Windsor Castle in Modern Times, painted the following ...”

“... rather unexpectedly, to write syllabic verse – a departure which led to his calling on the aged Elizabeth Daryush, then a little known exponent of the method, and to the publication of a volume of hers with his Preface. Yet for all his various skills there is often in his writing – prose and verse – a certain ungainliness. It is not to be wished ...”

“... the head of the Warwickshire branch, Edward Arden, was first implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth I, then tried and executed. As a result, official persecution of Catholics in the area was renewed. Hughes notes that Shakespeare’s father, John, was a recusant, and he also accepts as genuine a Spiritual Testament, found in 1784 and signed by John ...”

“... I on the Romanov estate of Ismailovo. This may indeed have been English, perhaps even a gift from Elizabeth I to Ivan IV, but Peter first sought tuition in the shipyards of Amsterdam. It was only when the Dutch failed to instruct him ‘in the Mathematical Way’ he required that he repaired to England, ‘and there, in four Months Time, finish’d his ...”

“... as director of the Royal Ballet in 1963, saying that he felt ‘like James I succeeding Queen Elizabeth’. Despite the obsession with Fonteyn and Nureyev, he insisted that the company couldn’t be run ‘for the benefit of two people’, and created The Dream in 1964 for Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell, forging an ...”

“... game. Long afterwards one of them explained that they had been enacting a scene in which Queen Elizabeth sent Mary Queen of Scots to the scaffold. Had one of those long dropsical captions been lost? Was everyone drunk at the time? We shall never know. Today’s publications have their share of impenetrable joke drawings and it is well-known that any ...”

“... and, finally, Shakespeare’. The arrows Titus shoots at Astraea are, in effect, aimed at Queen Elizabeth, often represented as Astraea, who is thus clearly associated with Tamora, ‘the whoring queen of the Goths’. I have to quote, because paraphrase would lose the flavour of these extraordinary statements. If you trouble to learn this way of writing it ...”

“... He lives in a clean and spartan house that he stocks with crisps, ice cream and Cherry Coke. Kate Elizabeth Russell flags up all the warning signs to which Vanessa remains oblivious. Strane goes through a performance of initially asking for her consent – the abuser wants to believe that his victim is his knowing co-conspirator – only to dispense with all ...”