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“... mark the lavish festivities, in February 1613, for the marriage of James I’s daughter Princess Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. Richard – a notorious spendthrift – was one of a handful of courtiers who, according to one witness, ‘dazzled the eyes of all who saw the splendour of their dress’. Larkin’s Richard is captured for ...”

“... 400th anniversary of Hilliard’s death this year has been marked by the publication of Elizabeth Goldring’s impeccably researched new biography, and by an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Elizabethan Treasures, featuring ninety works by Hilliard and Oliver, accompanied by an excellent catalogue by Catharine MacLeod.* Both books ...”

“... One of the general effects of hero-worship is its tendency to marshal resentment in those who claim themselves no party to the admiration. A good example of this offers itself at the opening of Vanity Fair – ‘A Novel without a Hero’ – when the single-minded Becky Sharp, high in a coach bound for Russell Square, flings a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary out of the window to land on the grass at the feet of her former teacher, a sworn disciple of the Great Lexicographer ...”

“... Hardy wrote in 1914 of his feeling ‘that we are living in a more brutal age than that, say, of Elizabeth’, which ‘does not inspire one to write hopeful poetry, or even conjectural prose, but simply make[s] one sit still in an apathy, and watch the clock spinning backwards’. For Henry James, the war seemed ‘to undo everything’: ‘My sense of what ...”