“... be reading this on a hard, cold seat in the privy, then they ought to be profoundly grateful to Elizabeth I’s godson Sir John Harington, who in his extraordinary pamphlet The Metamorphosis of Ajax (or ‘A Jakes’ – get it?) invented the flushing water closet. The s-bend was beyond Harington’s technological reach (his privy discharged via a valve ...”

“... of Parliament, as well as an armed raid in the Midlands to get hold of James’s young daughter Elizabeth (later the Winter Queen of Bohemia), and set her up as the figurehead of a new regime with, perhaps, the Earl of Northumberland as Protector. Having settled that, they swore an oath of secrecy, and received communion at a Mass said by the Jesuit John ...”

“... from the trade of archer. In January 1960 Evelyn Waugh declared that he and Betjeman, along with Elizabeth Bowen and L.P. Hartley, had lost their edge as writers. In these often maudlin years, Betjeman’s openness is a great asset to his biographer just as it was a considerable source of material to the poet. The flyleaf of the Collected Poems (1958) states ...”

“... Isles to Ferdinando I, grand duke of Tuscany, whose concern to see a non-Habsburg nominee succeed Elizabeth I prompted him to send Wotton on a mission to Scotland to warn James VI of a credible poisoning plot. Since Wotton’s connection with Essex made him an outlaw, he couldn’t travel through England, instead taking the ‘horse-killing route’ through ...”

“... Dr Palliser’s The Age of Elizabeth is the latest volume in a series which seeks to relate English and British economic and social history from the Anglo-Saxons to the Welfare State. Its initial and terminal dates as given in the title appear to follow a publisher’s or general editor’s dictum under which successive volumes will start to cover the precise date on which a previous author closed his account ...”

“... a power which is itself part of the common law and subject to its constraints. It was so when Elizabeth I’s autocratic successor, James I and VI, wanted to rule by proclamation; it was so in 2010 when Theresa May wanted to use the royal prerogative to bypass Parliament; it was still so in 2017 when it was proposed that the UK leave the EU by ministerial ...”

“... they chewed the melted wax or burnt wicks of the candles that lay before the altar. St Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, was so holy that he took a bite out of a relic: the arm bone of Mary Magdalene, kept at Fécamp Abbey in Normandy. As he pointed out to the horrified onlookers, he consumed Christ’s body every Sunday at Mass, so what was the problem?Both ...”

“... breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. Elizabeth Bishop, ‘At the Fishhouses’ ‘Like what we imagine knowledge to be’. There are many ways of imagining knowledge – this is a proposition not likely to provoke much dispute. But how about this one? There are many ways in which the ...”

“... Ludgate, where Wyatt’s rebels were repelled. It was in London that Mary died and that her sister Elizabeth was fêted and crowned. But London was also the most volatile and influential of the many local communities which made up Early Modern England, as well as by far the richest and most populous. The history of the 16th-century religious changes in London ...”

“... had triumphed in Worcestershire, but Mary died only a year after Dean Hawford. Her successor, Elizabeth I, once more turned religion to Protestantism, including the closure of the few monasteries, nunneries and friaries that Mary’s Catholic restoration had begun to coax back into life. The dissolution of the monasteries is an old tale oft told: the ...”

“... the misnamed ‘Year of Africa’, ‘a new era of the African Church was about to begin’; and Elizabeth Isichei has clearly felt the same Christian impulse from a somewhat more African-centred approach. Both writers are using a scale of reference wider than that of a mere transition from colonial to para-colonial institutions of African ...”

“... sour because it looks as though she will have to support her family by teaching the daughters of a bishop, but most would have shared her depression at the prospect. The efforts of the governess were exploited and undervalued. She was denied the privileges that supposedly brightened a lady’s life, and could not earn enough to allow for anything but the ...”

“... perfectly controls his own fate.’ Like J.A. Froude, balancing the books on Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, Elton believed that all Henry’s achievements were those of others, and above all the towering achievement of his minister Thomas Cromwell, whose idea it was to declare UDI on the pope, and, in effect, the rest of Europe. Not all of those who came ...”

“... from Henry VIII, a fierce conservative in liturgical matters, despite his own break with the bishop of Rome. Cranmer, the king’s watchful and scholarly chaplain, did not share his prejudices. On his first encounter with Protestantism in mainland Europe, on embassy in Lutheran Nuremberg, Cranmer took a keen interest in the innovative liturgy he saw ...”

“... has chipped away his deity, and who is deep-seatedly obsessed with the monstrous parachronism of Bishop Ussher, too late a date for the very earth. But then Nettleship is himself a touch belated, smouldering away thirty years after the publication of In Memoriam. Wilson, who writes with such easy assurance as must leave him plenty of time to attend to ...”