“... the unassuming disclaimer that he ‘is not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan’. Edward Said would have explained it as a consequence of imperial power: British travellers and writers have been drawn to South and West Asia for the same reasons French ones ventured to North Africa and the Levant. To an extent, this is surely ...”

“... self-expression, self-justification and self-explanation. Yet they did not give themselves away. Edward White Benson took charge of his five brothers and sisters at the age of 14, after the death of his father in 1842. This father had been an unsuccessful research chemist who had invested what money he had in a process for manufacturing white lead, but ...”

“... The structural ironies of Edward Thomas’s life still condition his reputation. Just as he made a late poetic start, so criticism has been slow to gather momentum. Even the recent spate of studies – by Michael Kirkham, Stan Smith, and the contributors to Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated ...”

“... Henry’s subjects, however, a darker suspicion was forming: that his sickness, like the leprosy said to have afflicted his grandfather, was a punishment for the primal crime of the Lancastrian dynasty, the setting aside of the rightful King, Richard II, in 1399. In order to forestall the drastic cure advocated by York and his supporters, Henry’s advisers ...”

“... to the station at four thirty, smelling powerfully of brandy. Seeing I was a bit dejected, Bruce said he would plug me with John Major and David (Young) ... I went to Brooks’s, lost £150 and my appetite waned. Returned here and ate a toasted bun, first food since a banana at 1.30. In the tea room I had a chat with Fallon, a nice cool whip. I complained ...”

“... on Palm Sunday, he took the throne from the weak, ineffectual Henry VI and was crowned King Edward IV.Usurpers were plentiful in the 15th century. Edward’s claim was by lineal descent from Edward III, and was a strong one if you ignored the deposition of Richard II in 1399. In the ...”

“... on Baudelaire, Roland Barthes on Balzac, Fredric Jameson on Conrad, Julia Kristeva on Mallarmé, Edward Said on Jane Austen, Paul de Man on Proust, Gilles Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some ...”

“... or that he was ‘agnostic’ himself about the Holocaust. Though it’s sometimes said that there is no link between his linguistic work and his political activism, Chomsky himself has from time to time – under prodding from interviewers – drawn speculative connections between them. Perhaps it is possible to construct a liberal argument ...”

“... not broadcast their speeches and very few Americans heard them. Other prominent liberals, such as Edward Kennedy, Barbara Mikulski and Pat Schroeder, were so well submerged they were almost invisible. In marked contrast to the Republicans at San Diego, who gave great prominence to Bush, Ford and Reagan, the Democrats excluded from the programme their one ...”

“... language, but had read enough, and had a passionate interest, and was eager to live there,’ she said. ‘I wanted to live in this land; I had to live there, and master the language.’ Two years later, aged 23, Frankenthaler painted Mountains and Sea (1952), its watery veils of green, blue, pink, ochre and grey spread irregularly across the surface in ...”

“... Arthur Benson​ never stopped dreaming about his father. Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, dropped dead saying the Confession in 1896 – he sank onto his prayer cushion and didn’t get up again – but nearly twenty years later his son found him crouched in the cupboard under the stairs, dressed in his purple cassock and playing with some toys: ‘Papa … giggled; then he said: “But now that you have found me out, you must run down here as often as you can, and we will have a good game at something – You don’t know what fun it is ...”

“... haste, – for I had but an hour at my disposal, – I rushed to Chapman & Hall in Piccadilly, and said what I had to say to Mr Edward Chapman in a quick torrent of words ... Looking at me as he might have done at a highway robber who had stopped him on Hounslow Heath, Mr Chapman said that ...”

“... are a burden on us, not the other way about, and b. that the chief difficulty at every stage of Edward VIII’s life lay in the finding and invention of things for him to do. The same principle – of pointless duties joylessly undertaken – underlay his very conception. Prince Albert Victor, theoretical heir to the heir to the throne in the 1890s, appears ...”

“... his puzzlement at a great change that had taken place during his lifetime. In his boyhood, he said, the English ‘were taken to be the meekest of the barbarians … inferior [even] to the wretched Scots’. Now, in his late middle age, ‘they are a fiercely bellicose nation [who] have overturned the ancient military glory of the French by victories so ...”

“... The abdication of Edward VIII belongs to a class of events that can never be adequately treated by historians, since both the act and the actors transcend the conventional boundaries of the historian’s craft. All the evidence suggests that Edward was a mediocre character of limited intelligence and scant scruple, remarkable only for his gigantic powers of self-deception ...”