“... for Scotland, in 1996); the numbering of monarchs (an issue at the accessions of Edward VII and Elizabeth II); and the official neglect (usually philatelic) of Scottish history and achievement have marked the wayside of the long march to devolution. The creation of the new Parliament itself gave birth to another spurious controversy: should the old Royal ...”

“... in Buckingham Palace are saying it. Next summer’s Golden Jubilee, marking fifty years since Elizabeth II’s Coronation, will not be the national jamboree and mass outpouring of affection that courtiers remember from 1977. It will be a modest, understated affair: a tasteful celebration for those who want it.In the event, of course, the jamboree was ...”

“... at Louth in October 1536 were duly enforced in the reigns of Henry VIII’s children Edward and Elizabeth. So much for the events. But it is the interpretation of the events which has generated a small shelf’s worth of books and articles on the subject of the Pilgrimage of Grace, of which Hoyle’s is only the latest, if the most accessible. There are two ...”

“... diplomats continued to study Latin, and often used it in negotiations (a number of monarchs, like Elizabeth I and Philip II, also spoke it accurately and well). For the old, teleological story, in which the vernaculars marched forward to a natural triumph, Waquet substitutes something much more complex: a dance, in which every forward movement was ...”

“... utterances – ‘you are now husband and wife’; ‘I name this ship Queen Elizabeth’ – make themselves true by being uttered.) In part, Callon has in mind loosely ‘economic’ practices such as marketing and accountancy, and the Enron scandal has certainly focused attention on how key data such as firms’ earnings are ...”

“... winning through against the forces of darkness, like Jane Eyre, like Anne of Green Gables, like Elizabeth I. Read Oranges now and you will still find in it the exuberance and the craft of a jack-in-the-box. There is so much energy stowed away in those neat, demure little sentences. It will leap out and cuff you hard. You can feel that will in the way ...”

“... belief that A Midsummer Night’s Dream might reflect aspects of the performances put on before Elizabeth I at Kenilworth, 12 miles from Stratford, in 1575. Harry Goldingham, the actor who played Arion, apologetically tore off his costume and revealed his true identity in a way that’s very like Snug the joiner’s declaration ‘that I as Snug the joiner ...”

“... Johnson wrote The Lives of the Poets,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning grumbled, ‘and left out the poets.’ She exaggerated, of course, but a book of that title which omitted Chaucer and Shakespeare, Spenser and all the Elizabethans, Donne and nearly all the Jacobeans, while including a host of nonentities, such as Pomfret, Stepney, Dyer, Smith, Duke and King, was at the very least defective and misleading ...”

“... about the nature of the real’, it falls apart: we should be and are in no doubt that John and Elizabeth Proctor are unjustly accused. Miller has p0inted out that The Crucible tends to be staged in countries which are about to enter or leave a period of dictatorship. This is not because the play is a philosophical treatise, or indeed a documentary about a ...”

“... who died before the writer was born. His father, both drunk and sober, would talk to him about Elizabeth, always adding that she should have lived and he, the boy, should have died; he was ‘questioning my right even to occupy space in his world’. John had a younger sister too, called Margaret. They were haunted children, he suggests. Margaret had ...”

“... station./Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small’ against the author of ‘Arches’ – besides, Elizabeth Bishop was a great admirer of both. From ‘The Payne Whitney Poems’, I ranged happily over the rest of The Morning of the Poem (1980), and then the Selected and Collected Poems of 1990 and 1993. The Collected was never published in the UK, but the ...”

“... boy with immense talent and optimism to a mutilated gender fiasco who busies himself impersonating Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8? Jackson is a protean idea of a person, rather confused, rather desperate, but complete in his devotion to self-authorship. His every move shows him to be a modern conundrum about race and identity and selfhood. He might make us ...”

“... what the perfect servant could do. But Lucy has her dark counterpart in the terrible Miss Kilman, Elizabeth Dalloway’s governess. ‘Bitter and burning’, she is the ugly, angry poor who are always with us, ‘with the power and taciturnity of some prehistoric monster’. But though ancient she is also yet to come. ‘She had always earned her living. Her ...”

“... trading, Taverner argues, remained remarkably unchanged in its essentials from the last days of Elizabeth I to the outbreak of the First World War: ‘street sellers came from a similar swathe of the working poor, trod the streets with similar tools and tactics, and played a similarly vital role in the city’s food supply.’ But as hawkers performed the ...”

“... Wales; then Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, with whom it is likely he had an affair; and finally Elizabeth Armistead, another former mistress of the prince (Fox eventually married Armistead in secret). Personal happiness offered one compensation for royal opprobrium. Global affairs were another kind of distraction. The fortunes of the Burke family were ...”