“... combined fact and fiction in their content as well as in their occasion and mode of production. Edward English, a butcher executed for robbery in 1707, tells us that he was ‘Born at South-Gate in Cork, and lived there for the space of Fourteen Years; during which time my poor Parents endeavour’d to keep me to School; soon after I left Cork, and came for ...”

“... therefore a ‘street of civic pride and pageantry’. The events of 13 October 1247, the Feast of Edward the Confessor, were ‘not untypical’, according to the authors, though it can’t have been an everyday experience to see the king dressed in sackcloth and carrying a reliquary of Christ’s blood, a gift from the patriarch of Jerusalem. Retracing his ...”

“... likely to be seen as settling a score rather than diagnosing the ills of the literary marketplace. Edward St Aubyn, whose new novel, Lost for Words, is a satirical farce about the machinations behind a famous literary prize, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006 with Mother’s Milk, but lost out to Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. ‘Ego’ can ...”

“... never becomes extinct, though, even when its talismanic objects disappear. As Guang Yu Ren and Edward Denison put it, ‘there are some things for which extinction is a mere blip in a broader existential experience that long outlives the subject’s original function.’ I can still recall the strange, shifting sound of the fax machine in the old LRB ...”

“... was the kind of woman Sargent painted, and he did paint her. She was thought to have been one of Edward VII’s mistresses. By 1907 Mabel was 50, had spread emotionally and physically, and was known as ‘Ladye’. Ladye’s hot-water-bottles were called Jones and Charlie, and she petted and spoiled them. As John’s first ...”

“... not feel at home here he would not feel out of place among streets like Greene and Grand and Great Jones, the cast-iron district which I see from my window. I would give him, too, any work by Edward Hopper, whose paintings could often pass as illustrations to the poems of Larkin; and in particular People in the Sun ...”

“... shared no man’s land seems oddly larger than the territory disputed. The opening move was Ernest Jones’s three-decker monument (1953-57), and his successors make us choose a Freud, as if to write this life without a case to prove were impossible. If we need more lives of Freud it is because there is safety in numbers, but the evidential burden tends to ...”

“... three young officers she loved – Victor Richardson, Geoffrey Thurlow and her younger brother, Edward, all killed in action. When one reads Brittain’s diary, it is hard not to resent the way Leighton cut across the natural line of her development. In the early entries, despite some priggishness and superior airs, she cuts a very appealing figure. She ...”

“... for a future novelist. Persistent rumours that she was not the daughter of George Frederic Jones but the illegitimate offspring of a Scottish peer or an English tutor clearly attest to a sense that there was something otherwise inexplicable about this ambitious daughter of Old New York. Her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), says nothing about ...”

“... Diana’s social authority depended on political powerlessness. As Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones, argued of George V (and the argument holds for Diana), once the monarch becomes divorced from the discharge of political power, once government ‘decomposes’ into two persons, one ‘untouchable, irremovable and sacrosanct’ (the king), and the other ...”

“... to ‘usually gives’. The sentence wasn’t included at all in the book. At Wilde’s trial, Edward Carson used the text of Dorian as evidence against Wilde, and made a clear distinction between the two versions, referring to the book as ‘the purged edition’. But the story, as Frankel makes clear, is not as simple as that. Lippincott’s, using a ...”

“... market at Kiev. He was not unlike the old gardener who waxed eloquent on the virtues of the King Edward potato, adding perfunctorily that it was not ‘an eating potato’. Henry James would have seen the point. In 1870 he wrote to his elder brother William from Malvern, England, where the hotel fed him mostly on mutton and potatoes, to say how much he ...”

“... unable to manage, was left to the great early generations of linguists in the 20th century, led by Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield in America, Daniel Jones in Britain, and Roman Jakobson and Prince Nikolai Troubetzkoy on the Continent. Saussure’s most important breakthrough, the one that later allowed a vigorous ...”

“... itself as one of the pieties of Crusading historiography long before the veteran Python, Terry Jones, delivered his adverse verdict on television. Even novelists like Scott, Henty and Rider Haggard have been inclined to take a remarkably severe view of the Crusading enterprise. It is hardly surprising that modern Arab historians, besides condemning the ...”

“... Interests for April 1994 shows the former whip and foreign office minister Tristan Garel-Jones to be an adviser to British Gas, the Union Bank of Switzerland and the civil engineering group Biwater International. David Mellor has amassed 12 paid consultancies since resigning from office, including Racal Tacticom, Ernst and Young, Short ...”