“... 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 ...”

“... out, has done this with particular fervency, and nowhere more so than in Oxford. When Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Regius Professor of Greek from 1960 until 1989, published a collection of essays on the history of his discipline, he called it Blood for the Ghosts, referring not only to the necromantic scene in Homer’s Odyssey but also to a celebrated speech on Greek ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as they have witnessed it, and it is remarkably close to the plot of a revenge play: ‘Thy Edward he is dead, that killed my Edward,/Thy other Edward dead, to quit my Edward.’ There is little moral distance between the kinds of bloodshed that ...”

“... more annoying than adultery). His patient Loë Kann was mistress of his second-in-command Ernest Jones, and letters flew between the three of them about her treatment. Freud spoke warmly of her as he always did – ‘I have become extraordinarily fond of this Loë ... she is a treasure.’ In contrast with his venomous attitude towards some of his male ...”

“... want to lay to rest forever the ghost of the belief that it was the miners who brought down Edward Heath.’ All one-sentence formulations of historical events are inaccurate, even when encapsulating an essential truth. So it is with Gormley’s ‘It was not the miners, but Ted Heath who brought himself down.’ The crisis came because a new assertive ...”

“... someone who sopped the sheets in one foster home after another. One of the killer’s victims, ‘Edward Letterman ... Short, overweight and white’, gets it just after visiting a porno shop. ‘White boys in general’ are given to speculating about the sexual habits of each others’ mothers, while forceful white fathers, called things like ‘Bird’ and ...”

“... physicians were hoarding medical lore more advanced than the West’s. In the 1780s, Sir William Jones, the great Sanskrit scholar, had included medical remedies among some of the very earliest translations he made from the ancient Indian classics. Over the following decades, large numbers of Indian pharmacopoeia were collected and published. In the ...”

“... When​ faced by admirers, Edward Lear was inclined to portray himself as a puzzle, or a trap: ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’     Who has written such volumes of stuff! Some think him ill-tempered and queer,     But a few think him pleasant enough.The first observation was originally made by somebody who did not know Mr Lear ...”

“... it is appropriate, when not. The influences – Hopkins in ‘George Chapman – The Iliad’, Edward Thomas in ‘On Foscombe Hill’ and ‘Up There’ and possibly ‘Imitation’, Jonson in ‘We Who Praise Poets’, Whitman and possibly D.H. Lawrence in ‘Felling a Tree’ – are discernible but never for certain, because so thoroughly assimilated ...”

“... fragmentary but direct, of events in the world before her birth, and the neonate Robert, in Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, not only remembers being born (someone ‘clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side’) but the preceding state of bliss – ‘never the whole thing again, the whole warm thing all around him, being ...”

“... Rotten or Sid Vicious, eclipsing the group’s musical muscle: drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock. (It was Matlock who wrote nearly all the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial precursor in grasping that bad ...”

“... Philip Larkin met Monica Jones in 1946 at Leicester University College. She was an assistant lecturer there, and Larkin was an assistant librarian. Both had firsts in English from Oxford. Monica Jones was an able lecturer, but she never published anything and so was never promoted, although she stayed at Leicester until she retired in 1981 ...”