“... a tragedy, that the objects I had enjoyed trying to identify – was this Prince Albert or a young Edward VII? – also represented something unknowably private and painful.Objects from the past, if they survive, lose and accrue meaning over time. Their original human associations and contexts, their given purposes and original attractions, dissolve and are ...”

“... we insist on its ‘proper disposal’. Hohn’s ideas are more or less in tune with those of Edward Abbey: in his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, a Vietnam vet called Hayduke wages guerrilla war on landscape-blighting public works projects but defiantly drops litter along the highways he hates. A few decades later it’s the polluter-sponsored ...”

“... he moved badly; he was no athlete, hated having to get up on a horse, and had, according to Ivor Brown, ‘the most meaningless legs imaginable’. He had to conquer, and succeeded completely in doing so, his early tendency to shyness, self-consciousness and laziness. He was proud of his voice, perhaps occasionally too much in love with it, especially in ...”

“... his fold the Grub Street Scots, such as William Guthrie, Robert Heron, Gilbert Stuart and Dr John Brown. Some of these men had fallen foul of Robertson, who became principal of Edinburgh University in 1762, or Dr William Cullen of the city’s medical school, and so had to make their living in London, while keeping up a crapulous small-arms fight against the ...”

“... for example, that other lost play, The Fronny) reconstructed by the patient detective work of Edward Mendelson, repeatedly exemplify this association. The Enemies of a Bishop (1929), published here for the first time, ends with Robert Bicknell shooting his Spectre, a crime the village policeman greets with typical equanimity: Policeman: Ee’s ...”

“... the garden bough shall sway,  The tender blossom flutter down,  Unloved, that beech will gather brown, This maple burn itself away: Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair,  Ray round with flames her disk of seed,  And many a rose-carnation feed With summer spice the humming air ... As year by year the labourer tills  His wonted glebe, or lops the ...”

“... was dubbed knight, he kissed his weapon. Sword responded to sword; swords were symbols. When Edward I’s judges asked Earl Warenne by what warrant he held his lands, the Earl brandished, not charters and legal records, but his ancestral sword, sign of his lineage and of his right to hold lands by the law of conquest. In his stimulating work on Medieval ...”

“... says a Dunhill salesman blowing rings of U-phoria out of the slim panatella of his body wrapped in brown, ‘they wanted to make all the cigars in one factory and put all their cigars in one big box with no label on the lid.’ He closed his eyes and opened them again. ‘That wouldn’t do, of course,’ he went on, ‘so we persuaded them to do ...”

“... grist to Constant’s radical mill, and he gleefully took on Bottom Dogs by the American writer Edward Dahlberg: a book so shocking that it was published in a limited edition of 500 copies with gilt tops at 15 shillings – double the normal price of novels. But when Arnold Bennett, then at the height of his fame as a critic, wrote that ‘it took you by ...”

“... itself was deadly dull. The only previous extended discussion of the Statesman’s first years was Edward Hyams’s ‘house’ history. Adrian Smith makes a fuller attempt to place the early New Statesman in its various political and intellectual contexts and relates the fortunes of the small-circulation political weekly to the seismic political changes of ...”

“... the introduction of a prices and incomes policy, 43 per cent are in favour of it. (Come back Edward Heath!) On several issues a substantial minority stand out against the orthodox view. In a Party that has done so well out of the first-past-the-post system it is heartening to discover that 23 per cent are in favour of Proportional Representation. Another ...”

“... the Government became ever more strained in spite of the fact that a former Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath, was on Arthur Andersen and Co’s payroll. The legal action and the strain led to a decree banning Arthur Andersen from Government work. It was considered ‘highly inappropriate’ for a government – any government – to employ an accountancy ...”

“... translations supplied by James Hardiman, John O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry, John O’Daly, Edward Walsh, Samuel Ferguson and other sources. It is impossible to know how Mangan could have written so many poems and essays in a few years beset by poverty, illness, drunkenness and what he himself called ‘moral insanity’. Mangan’s place in Irish ...”

“... seem, Bew argues convincingly that it came from America, from the futuristic utopian fiction of Edward Bellamy, author of Looking Backward (1887). In Bellamy’s novel a resident of late 19th-century Boston is hypnotised and doesn’t wake up until the year 2000. By then the United States has been transformed into an ultra-modern, urban, mechanised ...”

“... in a bottle of champagne or even a helicopter ride, and he had most definitely never received a brown envelope of any kind, but he had an allegiance to the party, because it was a tradition among his people, and he was a popular choice in the local council elections, out west, past Galway city towards Connemara, further than Beyond Barna and just shy of ...”