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“... in which he achieved celebrity as a foul-tempered prosecutor, first of the Earl of Essex, then of Sir WalterRaleigh (‘Thou viper … thou hast an English face but a Spanish heart!’) and of the Gunpowder plotters. With the help of his second marriage, to Burghley’s granddaughter Elizabeth, the widow of ...”

“... way could there be of demonstrating that commitment than bringing to justice the notorious pirate Sir Walter Ralegh? Gondomar had already returned to Spain by the time of Ralegh’s execution in October (he couldn’t stand the British climate), but it was widely seen as his work. He had, quite unwittingly, created a martyr. Ralegh became the last of the ...”

“... seems to have made five of them. He very probably sailed with the 1584 expedition promoted by Sir WalterRaleigh to reconnoitre sites for an English colony. He was certainly one of the party of five or six hundred men (about one hundred of them colonists) who went back in 1585. It was on that voyage that he ...”

“... that ‘Belle Million’ has to be included because it’s one of several stories by ‘Leslie Walter’, which Horowitz is convinced is James’s favourite pseudonym? The 25 stories in The Uncollected Henry James ‘were chosen’, Horowitz says in his foreword, ‘as a sampling of James’s unacknowledged publications for their use of Swedenborgian ideas ...”

“... the table. One is that he went to Paris with his fellow Corpus man, Nicholas Faunt, who worked in Sir Francis Walsingham’s office and had gone there to look into the doings of the English ambassador. The other, floated by Riggs, is that he may have been sent to the Spanish Netherlands in connection with negotiations for a peace with Spain which were to ...”

“... way. One is academic. One is by a very literary-minded critic (and draws its title from a poem by Sir WalterRaleigh). One is a piece of vivid journalism recognisably in the tradition of Norman Mailer and other modern American writers. All these books are from literary stables. Michael Arlen’s first appeared in the ...”

“... to some of the occultists, libertines and unbelievers whom he sees hiding behind esotericism (Sir WalterRaleigh is a case in point), but his central thesis of the pervasiveness of dissimulation in 16th and 17th-century Europe is certain to stand. While few would argue with his view that Calvin’s dealings with ...”

“... in the troubled days of James I and is often appended to accounts of the capture and execution of Sir WalterRaleigh after his return from the Orinoco in 1618. More than three hundred years later in Germany, a related tale was told about a soldier returning home in the desperate days following defeat in World War ...”

“... Robertson embarked on this project as a result of an evening in 1999 when the Australian judge Sir Michael Kirby delivered a lecture in the hall of Gray’s Inn to mark the 350th anniversary of Charles’s execution. Kirby, one of the common law’s great jurists, was not unsympathetic to the plight of the king. It was in the course of preparing a paper ...”

“... who was escorted away under a shower of stones. This story is to be found in The War in the Air by Sir WalterRaleigh, who also tells how a British officer in Argentina was stoned for refusing to fly. The fuss that the French made over Blériot had much to do with their pique at seeing the American Wilbur Wright perform ...”

“... fiction, and less transfixed by the problem of the author. The tale, told in Smoke, about Sir WalterRaleigh trying to measure the weight of the clouds of smoke produced by burning tobacco (he weighs the smoking apparatus before and after) combines all the classic Auster elements: the excitement of distilled ...”

“... On​ 10 January 1616, Sir Thomas Roe was received by Emperor Jahangir at his court in Ajmer in Northern India. Jahangir sat in an overhead gallery, with guests standing in hierarchically ranked tiers, and Roe remarked how ‘this sitting out hath so much affinity with a theatre … the king in his gallery; the great men lifted on a stage as actors; the vulgar below gazing on ...”

“... representation’. One is reminded of the argument of the late Frances Yates, popularised by Sir Roy Strong, about the replacement of the image of the Virgin Mary by that of the Virgin Queen. This brief summary does less than justice to the richness of Greenblatt’s interpretation, or to his skill in interweaving 16th-century texts – Reginald Scot’s ...”

“... the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason’, and the British prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross, to say without blushing: ‘There are those who would perhaps say that these wretched men should have been dealt with summarily without trial . . . But that was not the view of the British government.’ There was and is little doubt ...”

“... in warfare’ as ‘the supreme proof of manhood’. That manliest of men, the Elizabethan hero Sir Richard Grenville, dining with the Spanish sea captains who had captured him, proved the robust superiority of the Englishman to the Don by chewing his wineglass and swallowing the pieces, ‘the blood pouring out of his mouth’. But this military ideal ...”