“... a profession of Protestant faith in Shakespeare’s own hand, even a letter to the bard from Queen Elizabeth herself flowed from his ready quill. And once Ireland had sorted out a supply of ink and techniques for making paper look old, why not write versions of King Lear and Hamlet which omitted the awkward bawdy scenes? Why not even compose a whole new play ...”

“... on the docks in Barcelona shows the slaves’ fetters lined with cloths to try to stop chafing. Elizabeth McGrath discusses at far greater depth in From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem, her forthcoming book on depictions of slaves, how this article of dress (so to speak) recurs often invisibly, a symbol of slavery itself. Although Rublack ...”

“... emphasises Bligh’s gift for intimacy, especially with women. His correspondence with his wife, Elizabeth, is full of affection. ‘My Dear Dear Love and My Dear Children,’ he begins one letter, assuring his wife: ‘I love you dearer than ever a Woman was loved.’ Not that dear ‘Betsy’ was fooled into thinking that her husband had no steel in ...”

“... The Accidental City joins several popular and better-written histories of New Orleans – Grace Elizabeth King’s A History of Louisiana, Herbert Asbury’s The French Quarter, and The New Orleans City Guide and Gumbo Ya-Ya (both compiled by the Federal Writers’ Project). The next chapter may belong to geographers. As Powell points out, New Orleans is ...”

“... he took up with her too, although she came to infuriate him. Then there was a year or so with Elizabeth von Arnim, and a woman who tried to kill herself in front of him, and a few (not many) prostitutes. And there was also of course Rebecca West, whom he called his ‘panther’, and by whom he had a son (whose middle name was Panther) in 1914. West was ...”

“... Women (1984) – about how all women are bitches – was coloured by his rancorous divorce from Elizabeth Jane Howard. Bradford’s Exhibit A, however, is ‘Letter to a Friend about Girls’ (‘After comparing lives with you for years,/I see how I’ve been losing’), which Larkin tinkered with endlessly but chose not to publish because, he said, ‘the ...”

“... for Mary Tudor’s revived Catholic Church in England, but instantly abandoned by the Protestant Elizabeth I, and not taken up by Protestants until the 19th century. Granted, there was much more to the innovations in Counter-Reformation Catholicism than Trent ever got round to discussing: you would not know from its decrees, for instance, that it was in this ...”

“... as a metaphysical doctrine, it was designed to stabilise both state and monarchy. As set out in Elizabeth I’s reign it decreed that The King has in him two Bodies, viz, a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities … But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or ...”

“... shadow club’ where Johnson could spar at leisure with other intellectual women: Frances Burney, Elizabeth Montagu, Hannah More. Johnson had his own room at Streatham Place, and wrote most of Lives of the Poets there, reading manuscript sections aloud to those present much as Samuel Richardson had read draft novels to his ‘female senate’ thirty years ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Jesus, no good angels, only a hell there was, and devils to carry me thither’. We also hear of Elizabeth, wife of the Nonconformist minister Oliver Heywood, who battled throughout her life with ‘the unbeleefe of her own heart’. But these are exceptions that seem to prove Hunter’s rule that Christian doubt differs from the rational scepticism of the ...”

“... big family, and the Diary is often at its most comically eloquent when dealing with Nancy, Ben, Elizabeth, Will, Lizzy, Jack and their successors. Though the master-servant relationship is quite unequivocal, there is not a hint of that reciprocal class-consciousness which was to preoccupy the Victorians. To Woodforde and Nancy the servants are ‘our ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”