“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hard study and relentless practice, making, building – the emphasis is constant. Moreover, from P.J. Kavanagh’s warm and judicious Introduction, but also from the poems themselves, we get the clear impression that Gurney in the years after demobilisation went without sleep, went without food, quite simply overworked himself into his mental breakdown ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... emotional problems – were quite often traced back to the errant mother,’ writes Kathleen Jones in an essay on child guidance in the first half of the century. And ‘domineering wives’ created ‘spineless husbands who stayed away from their children to avoid confrontations’. There is certainly something of a history (Ladd-Taylor and Umansky’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... experienced traveller. Also in the English party was the embassy chaplain, a young man called Edward Terry. Years later, Terry published a memoir of his Indian travels, and this obscure volume – A Voyage to East India (1655) – contains almost the only information we have about Coryate’s last months. Coryate was by then in his early forties, but his ...”

“... it. Shall try a glass of hot water at bedtime.’ That is the equivalent of writing, ‘Must see Jones next week,’ and yet there is in it Gissing’s additional and personal pleasure in recording failure. Few diaries, even those of naturally sanguine people, are interested in success. Anne Chalmers in 1830 wrote about a visit to the zoo as if she was ...”

“... that there was anything very equitable about his dealings with them. As the Jacobean diplomat Sir Edward Hoby observed, it was ‘lawful for a Christian to take away anything from infidels’. Pynchon was a restless man and six years after his arrival in America he headed a group of settlers who moved from Massachusetts Bay to a new site. Formerly the home ...”