“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... initial k- unit of the word we write as ‘cat’ for a p- unit, and we get ‘pat’. The -k v. -p distinction recurs at the end of a syllable in ‘tack’ v. ‘tap’, but these two sounds are never found adjacent to each other in the same syllable in English, as in the hypothetical kpat, pkat, takp or tapk. The distribution of phonemes and their ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mainly by inference. For example, the first poem the adolescent Eliot fell in love with was Edward Fitzgerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Fitzgerald was exclusively attracted to men – though like Eliot embarked on an unhappy marriage – and the Rubáiyát itself was addressed in Persian to a young boy, which Eliot, with his interest in ...”

“... Farouq, a charming and erudite Moroccan working in an internet café but versed in the thought of Edward Said and Paul de Man, who makes the case for al-Qaida, or at least contests the case against it. In some sense he wants to recruit Julius to an Islamic worldview, if not an Islamic world order, but Julius sees through his persuasiveness to the rage beneath ...”

“... What Chakrabarty wants to do with ‘Europe’, then, is in some ways similar to what Edward Said did with the ‘Orient’: to fashion a subversive genealogy. But instead of Said’s relentless polemic, Chakrabarty’s book features critique and self-criticism in equal measure. For me, Chakrabarty has the edge here, because for Said the Orient is ...”

“... forth into the vast unknowns of social class, religious denomination and regional culture. Edward Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (1963) was a landmark here, and we now possess histories of feminism, pacifism, of the movements against slavery and cruelty to animals, and for free trade, family allowances, factory-hours and public ...”