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“... Four hundred years ago, on 17 October 1586, Sir Philip Sidney died at the age of 31 of a wound sustained in a skirmish at Zutphen, where his forces had fought for the Dutch cause against Spanish domination of the Netherlands. It was one of the great deaths of English history. His early biographers – or hagiographers – wrought a tale of battlefield heroism and deathbed stoicism that helped the myth of Sidney to become more powerful than the man had ever been ...”

“... offered the Polish crown: absurd, but can there be smoke without any fire whatsoever? In May 1575, Philip Sidney returned to Little England. If England was small beer, so was he, no baron but plain Mr Sidney. He was 20 years of age. Sidney’s career makes a bizarre episode in that ...”

“... rhetorical currency required for any respectable courtship or commercial transaction. As a boy, Philip Sidney – whose works Richardson was later to publish, and to study with attention – was carefully trained in the art of letter writing. His bedroom, according to his early biographer Thomas Moffet, ‘overflowed with elegant epistles’ which he ...”

“... In the gentle countryside to the west of Maidstone in Kent lies Penshurst House, the home of the Sidney family since the middle of the 16th century. The most famous of the Sidneys, Sir Philip, included an affectionate account of Penshurst in his Arcadia, where it is thinly disguised as the house of Kalendar ...”

“... there many readers have an extra difficulty about the miracles. A brief paragraph about Sir Philip Sidney, thrown in as an extra, does more to make the position clear. Lying wounded on a battlefield, the aristocratic young officer was brought a cup of water, but handed it on to a wounded trooper, saying: ‘Thy need is greater than mine.’ Kermode ...”

“... Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1856-70), his early 20th-century biographers, Sidney Lee and Conyers Read, presented him as an astute and distinguished patriot who laid the foundations for the modern security services. But then Read’s three-volume study of 1925 reflected his own political preoccupations and professional ...”

“... playing with it. So in comedies a name does not have to show a fate or a characteristic. The name Philip Pirrip, known as Pip, sounds like the cry of a bird: a pirr is both a name for and the cry of a tern, which Pip might well meet in the Kent marshes, along with the odd ‘melancholy gull’. As Fowler notes, pips can grow big and move upwards too. The ...”

“... desires. Part of the opposition to the match came from Leicester’s nephew and heir-apparent, Philip Sidney, who in 1577 had returned from a brilliant diplomatic mission to find himself unappreciated. The Queen suspected his impetuosity and was angered by the plan to marry him to the daughter of the hero of the Dutch resistance, William of ...”

“... court, also based her career on an identification with her father’s family, which included Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke. This illustrious literary patrimony, we are shown, might have inspired her to risk the King’s displeasure by publishing her scandalous prose romance, The ...”

“... poets plagued by the censor. ‘Sometimes under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep,’ wrote Sir Philip Sidney, we can without risk ‘include the whole consideration of wrongdoings and patience’. Among the more agreeable qualities is a brisk Gibbonian way of dismissing those historians or historical characters whom the writer dislikes. ‘The wildly ...”

“... with the poet and that this is a ‘narcissistic and élitist identification (you too can be Sir Philip Sidney)’. Readers who surrender to their ‘misrecognition of themselves in the Poet’ deny themselves as readers: ‘In contrast, literary science will discuss the poem as construction, acknowledging it as labour; and in so doing, it poses the ...”

“... old literary model of the sleeping prince who wakes just in time, which the fiction and verse of Sidney and Spenser had used to urge Queen Elizabeth to mend her ways. What the editors of The Crisis of 1614 have enterprisingly done for that year could have been attempted for a number of other occasions in early modern English history. Whether or not we call ...”

“... subverts never were the point of poetry anyway. Perhaps in consequence, Hollander tends to follow Philip Sidney rather too closely in identifying poetry with fiction. He even takes literally the Sidneian symbolon that the poet ‘nothing affirms’, playfully adopting in his own criticism the evasive formula ‘whether ... or ... will not admit of easy ...”

“... of John Aubrey’s 17th-century writing. ‘My great Uncle … remembred him,’ Aubrey wrote of Philip Sidney, dead for three generations, ‘and sayd that he was wont, as he was hunting on our pleasant plaines, to take his Table booke out … and write downe his notions as they came into his head when he was writing his Arcadia.’ Searching for ...”

“... In the summer of 1618, Diego Sarmiento de Acuna, Count of Gondomar, Ambassador of Philip III to the Court of James I had a clever idea. For four years the proposal that James’s son Prince Charles should marry the Infanta Maria had been batted to and fro between London and Madrid in an attempt to bring about an Anglo-Spanish alliance ...”