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“... and doom caused by a sterile war, economic distress and mounting fears for the future, were over. Elizabeth, the ruler who had hung on to life for too long, was dead. The reaction which she had feared, she herself having experienced it in 1558 as heir to a dying monarch, happened. Relief, rather than mourning, greeted Gloriana’s passing; and all eyes turned ...”

“... on the coffins of people they have never known. This conflict of priorities is not a new one. Bishop Coverdale complained about weddings in 1552: there was too much dressing up, showing off, music, dancing, drinking, flirting, bawdy singing and raucous jollification; not enough sober religion. An Admonition to the Parliament, published twenty years ...”

“... nation. The rocklike reflectiveness of Ursula Le Guin and the ‘deep subjectivity’ of Elizabeth Bishop are evoked with a real warmth. When Bloom considers a poem at length, as he does Marianne Moore’s extraordinary poem ‘Marriage’, he often takes you places you never thought you might go. But these chapters can display the anxiety of ...”

“... times since it first appeared in the war a number of people have been riveted in this way by Elizabeth Smart’s one-off nouvelle. When the manuscript was accepted in 1941 she had wanted to call it Images of Mica, but George Barker, whom it was all about, flipped the typed pages at random and found a sentence beginning: ‘By Grand Central Station I sat ...”

“... good thing just now if English school-children, at least, were to get to know more about Queen Elizabeth and less about Adolf Hitler than they have been doing recently? Here, anyway, is the New Oxford’s contribution about Elizabeth, entrusted to a Welshman from its home university, Penry Williams, where the old one was ...”

“... a woman, a writer, and a person with the right progressive ideas. So could the author of the poem, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It is only fair to say, though, that this kind of wish-fulfilment is not only an accurate portrayal of the kind of selves that Charlotte and Elizabeth became, and wished to become: it is also a ...”

“... in DIY self-pickling. Compared with Highsmith in her seventies, her fellow drunk-dyke genius Elizabeth Bishop looked like a fresh-blooming flower in her later years – a regular Goop-enhanced Gwyneth.Then there was the compulsive sexual promiscuity – a festival of glut, recrimination and endlessly renewed licentious squalor (I almost wrote ...”

“... requires of a monarch. It was not always so. Whatever else has been said about the first Elizabeth (one recalls Sheridan’s ‘no scandal about Queen Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull. In sending her royal brother Edward VI her youthful likeness, soon to be hidden for ever behind ...”

“... and many service officers down to 26 majors and 71 captains, and also ecclesiastics: one arch-bishop, six bishops and 11 other clerics.’ One does not readily think of princes and dukes as book-borrowers and Ruskin’s words spring to mind: ‘We call ourselves a rich nation, and we are filthy and foolish enough to thumb each other’s books out of ...”

“... candidate: a translation of a mystical meditation into English from French made by Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen. The Glass of the Sinful Soul, as she called it, was not an original work, but a good pupil’s exercise, undertaken in 1544 at the age of 11 as part of her lessons. A long prayer by Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre, it was ...”

“... prejudice?), and then ‘the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil’, an image and a phrase Elizabeth Bishop might not have disdained, with its quiet metaphorical swell. The rhythms and play of sounds, the subtle presence of things remembered in things seen, convey a genius for observation that one doesn’t think of as Forsterian. The ...”

“... have recently explored the development of the Church of England over the two long reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and one of Collinson’s achievements, executed with singular modesty and generosity, has been to draw their conclusions together and to set them in perspective. But the findings which count for most are the author’s own. To the ...”

“... man! Then again, I’m of the school that thinks teachers should be weird and sort of hate you. Elizabeth Bishop comes to class, her eczema is very bad that day, she reads your poem and closes her eyes.Still, it sheds light. ‘Sparrow’, a third-person story from Liberation Day that is lovely on the first read and a little condescending on the ...”

“... domain of Anletār’. It began a correspondence between Sultan Murad III and the most renowned Elizabeth, most sacred queen, and noble prince of the most mighty worshippers of Jesus, most wise governor of the causes and affairs of the people and family of Nazareth, cloud of most pleasant rain, and sweetest fountain of nobleness and virtue, lady and heir of ...”

“... As readers of her book on The Ladies of Llangollen will know, Elizabeth Mavor relishes spirited, unorthodox women, free with their tongues and ready to snap their fingers at convention. Now she has found a new clutch of them in the Archives of the Royal Irish Academy: an Irish countess, a Russian princess, a young woman from Co ...”