“... those letters are published Hughes should be established with Keats, Hopkins, the early Yeats and Elizabeth Bishop as one of the most important letter-writing poets. The Selected Letters is sensitively and meticulously edited by Christopher Reid (the one mistake I noted is the attribution of Antigone to Euripides), and in his introduction he says that an ...”

“... or should they make us notice the artistry of the many pages scribbled in airports? In a review of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters, Heaney’s Field Day colleague Tom Paulin argued that ‘a poetics does operate when we read a letter,’ but that ‘the gifted correspondent has to appear negligent of effect.’ What successful letters show is ‘a rejection of ...”

“... reflected a nationally binding experience of the new religion after the settlement of 1559. Had Elizabeth I opened windows into men’s souls, she would have found that for every orthodox Protestant or sceptical Catholic there were thousands who embraced a mishmash of religion and magic, rituals and spells, theological oddments and garbled prayers. ‘For ...”

“... it, including Protestants. Pepys, for example, was ‘infinitely pleased’ with how his wife, Elizabeth, looked as St Catherine. St Catherine, though, was a devout princess who had converted to Christianity, and who was famous for converting others. A portrait of Catherine as Catherine of Alexandria anticipates that she, too, might convert others.Maria ...”

“... rather to stop the news getting out. (This was by no means a unique early example of fake news. Elizabeth I squashed the news of the dismal failure of Drake’s expedition to Coruna in 1589, the so-called Counter-Armada, so successfully that not a word of it leaked into English history books for three hundred years.) Cromwell was so shattered by this ...”

“... in one of the very few ships leaving from Port Said. Micheline got berths on the troopship Queen Elizabeth. On 18 July, she left with her daughters from Cairo’s central station. It was a madhouse, the platforms were crammed with every sort of refugee, desperate to attach themselves to any part of a train, including the roof. Many of them were Jews who had ...”

“... that tended to come and go, and which was never on view when, as often used to happen, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother dropped in for tea. There was not much about the royal family to which Sir Claude had not been privy. After his service with George V he had been briefly in the household of Edward VIII and moved smoothly on into the service of his ...”

“... a weight of woes’. One of Barbauld’s favourite books as a young woman, McCarthy tells us, was Elizabeth Carter’s translation of the slave-philosopher Epictetus, from which one lesson to be drawn was that superiority could come from smiling your way through bad trouble. When his cruel master tortured him, as Carter told the story in her ...”

“... who were willing to risk their lives in a desperate crusade,’ Wisner’s daughter, the historian Elizabeth Hazard, would write, ‘but its policies had subverted the possibility of an early detente with the Soviet Union.’In March 1957, back in Washington, Wisner offered to direct an operation to overthrow President Sukarno of Indonesia. It ended, Anderson ...”

“... to have tried to replace her (‘he looked for a surrogate mother in every relationship,’ says Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be ...”

“... invert the given limitations of the form, subduing the obtrusive repetition until it is invisible. Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’ is one perfect example. The other is Kipling’s ‘Sestina of the Tramp-Royal’. The strict, cramped, formal demands of the sestina are belied by the unbuttoned dialect and its illusion of relaxation and ...”

“... the limits of the empiricism prevalent in England then as now. ‘Already in the time of Queen Elizabeth,’ Count Keyserling wrote in Europe (1928), ‘the German spirit ... was to the respectable Britisher a horrid spectre; even then intelligence as such was already regarded as an unhealthy product made in Germany.’ There we see the spirit of ...”

“... world’s religions, from Ignatius Loyola to Julia Roberts in her ridiculous ashram in the film of Elizabeth Gilbert’s yogatastic self-fest, Eat, Pray, Love. It seems to me that the knockabout bit about TV golf doesn’t quite cover up a sentimentality, a bit of an idealisation of both IRS employees and your average yogic guru, the latter of whom is probably ...”

“... We agree with the submission received from two well-placed observers – Sir Michael Wood and Elizabeth Wilmshurst – that ‘one of the great strengths of UK foreign policy is the United Kingdom’s reputation for its strong commitment to the rule of law in international affairs,’ including ‘its compliance with its international obligations and its ...”

“... philanthropists and reformers – Cavell is there, and so are Queens Victoria and Alexandra, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Angela Burdett-Coutts. St Joan’s International Alliance, a Catholic body that was founded by suffragettes and is recognised today by both the Vatican and the UN, celebrated its centenary in 2011, and still distinguishes itself by ...”