“... The Diaries of Lord Louis Mountbatten 1920-1922, describing tours with an earlier Prince of Wales (Edward VIII). Some reviewers have sensibly wondered why this schoolboy-style log was disinterred. If it has any lasting value, it must be to the social historian with an eye for the vagaries of upper-class behaviour. The editor, Philip Ziegler, tells us that the ...”

“... quoted from The Faerie Queene and Cymbeline, Chadwick claimed: In the old days of the gallant Edward the Third, in the first half of the 14th century, there came into fashion among the children of England a game called barres or bars, which consisted of running from one barrier to another. It grew to be so popular that it at last became a nuisance, so ...”

“... first year of teaching at Yale (his students the following year included Richard and Su Rogers and Norman Foster), and there were no faxes or e-mails to facilitate long-distance exchanges. Yet the scintillating design, finalised late in 1960, was, according to the client, Edward Parkes, very much a joint ...”

“... Bar-Yosef’s persuasively argued study is to suggest that the influential model developed in Edward Said’s Orientalism won’t quite do as an explanation of popular English perceptions of the Holy Land. Said was steadily committed to the Palestinian cause, but the school of postcolonial criticism which he fathered has not fully appreciated the cultural ...”

“... but perhaps the best of all is ‘flowers’, which enters English via French after the Norman conquest. A variant of this word appears in several other languages. The Trotula, a widely circulated 12th-century collection of medical texts named after a female medical practitioner from Salerno and formerly attributed to her, was translated into 22 ...”

“... has the younger generation of royals exactly endeared itself to the national headmistress. Prince Edward has never recovered from the fiasco of It’s a Knockout, Fergie’s foray into fiction was equally ill-advised, and if Marina Ogilvy had not existed, the tabloids would probably have invented her (which to some extent they undoubtedly did). Even the ...”

“... latest and most ambitious blockbuster. The year is 1549. Henry has been dead for two years, and Edward, his 11-year-old son, perches hesitantly on the throne with his uncle, the Lord Protector Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, pulling the strings. The country is in bad shape. War with Scotland is costly and ...”

“... a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were well-known Jacobites, the family was well enough connected to ensure that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he shone ...”

“... Their ideology, however, is a cultural version of it. Until recently, as the Barbadan poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite says, West Indians ‘have been unable to afford the luxury of mythology’. Colonial history offers merely divisive images which can only provoke nostalgia, remorse, shame or rancour. Hence many West Indian writers have sought to re-align ...”

“... partisan, anti-semitic and anti-Western attacks on Israel, a charge grandiloquently pronounced by Norman Podhoretz in his imitation of Zola, ‘J’Accuse’ (Commentary, September 1982). The repetition and accumulation of these claims amount to a virtual orthodoxy, setting limits, defining areas, asserting pressures, and the Chancellor incident of July 1982 ...”

“... one. In traditional narratives, its losses are balanced out by the progress achieved by Norman rule in the formation of state and nation. In England, Flodden doesn’t appear on the list of iconic national military victories, a list that has always privileged success against the French – at Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt – over victories won on ...”

“... regionalism’ of Catalunya, Lombardy or Baden-Wuerttemberg. Indeed this nearly happened, with Edward Heath’s ‘Declaration of Perth’ in 1968, in favour of a devolved parliament. But in Scotland the private sector was no match for either Labour centralism or the rapacity of the City of London. The first fearfully complicated Labour’s attempt to ...”

“... pretension of the Terry Johnson-Nicholas Roeg film Insignificance; at the other, it inspired Norman Mailer’s ‘novel biography’ of a ‘possible’ Marilyn, which proved a triumph of intuitive speculation. Mailer leaned heavily on the first edition of Fred Lawrence Guiles’s book, suggesting that one day a great biography might be built on its ...”

“... valued, foreigner: ‘At home on the outskirts of Sheffield, the great steel town of Yorkshire, Mr Norman Pickering kissed his wife and daughter farewell …’ Would Bennett have ventured that (for us) redundant information as to Sheffield’s location and industry? But Bennett, of course, was a best-seller of a previous era and 80 per cent of his income was ...”

“... ended yet. On the contrary, the poetic scene is full of people who believe that by writing like Edward Thomas, on the one hand, or William Carlos Williams, on the other, they can recover or reconstitute innocence in their medium. And even a senior poet like Norman MacCaig, who is too old a hand to chase such a will of the ...”