“... subject under the sun. He cannot bear, for example, to mention Lord Balogh, the Balliol don Harold Wilson recruited as an economic adviser in 1964, without telling us what it was like to be an inter-war Hungarian radical under ‘a sclerotic, semi-fascist regime, brooding over its Habsburg past’, or to talk about Norway without throwing in a series of quick ...”

“... is always stimulated to an astonishing degree by clever blackguardism’) he hired Lockhart and Wilson, a couple of Scottish lawyers as blackguardly as they were cynical. ‘Wilson was tall, burly, fair-haired, florid-complexioned, gregarious: Lockhart small, dark, atrabilious, conspiratorial.’ What does that sentence ...”

“... Nothing substantive was achieved, while, as the British commander of Allied forces in the north, Edmund Ironside, noted at the time of the British withdrawal from North Russia in the autumn of 1919, the cost was to incur ‘the everlasting enmity of both sides – the Whites for deserting them, and the Reds for opposing them’.Anna Reid, author of the ...”

“... Heren led no cavalry into action, he at least became adventurously involved in the search for Sir Edmund Hillary, who was missing on Makalu in Nepal. When he offered to cable an account of his own experiences he received (as he tells in Growing upon the ‘Times’) the reply: ‘No, the readers of the Times are not interested in the adventures of its ...”

“... the businesslike world of film. One of his regrets is that he never managed to make a film about Edmund Kean, ‘the legendary British actor of the early 1800s’. The exec to whom he pitched it looked at him as if he were a ‘leper’. But in Sonny Boy, he says he has a new idea that makes him feel the ‘fire’ inside him is still burning: ‘What I want ...”

“... initiatives, such as aiding Hekmatyar’s successor, Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban. When Edmund McWilliams, the State Department’s special envoy to the Afghan resistance in 1988-89, wrote that ‘American authority and billions of dollars in taxpayer funding had been hijacked at the war’s end by a ruthless anti-American cabal of Islamists and ...”

“... which have lurked in plain view in the text of the Constitution since 1787. Figures such as James Wilson and Alexander Hamilton, and outside the convention itself, John Adams, James Iredell and Benjamin Rush, did not comprise a party as such, indeed they had their disagreements; but they shared a set of ideas derived from the constitutional royalism of the ...”

“... president, Robert Goheen, and drafted by Gardner Patterson, an economist at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Both men’s political instincts and diplomatic skills were tested to the limit when the report reached sceptical alumni, whose reservations were encouraged and amplified by Princeton’s director of ...”

“... life: it dealt a ‘decisive blow … to the unhurried “gentlemanly” style of business’, as Edmund de Rothschild put it. Warburg himself later claimed that he disliked the whole episode and would have preferred a friendly deal. But there can be no doubt that the rapid increase of the bank’s business dated from the moment he showed he was able to take ...”

“... Few critics have agreed – not even avowed Stein friends and enthusiasts like Carl Van Vechten or Edmund Wilson. No doubt contributing to the polite silence: the fact that reading The Making of Americans is rather like getting trapped in one of those clammy-horrible examination dreams in which the test questions morph into illegible squiggles or ...”

“... acting’. Edgar’s account of how Gloucester died is given within the staged tableau in which Edmund (for Bayley) merely ’enacts’ death. Edgar’s description serves to place Edmund’s death as that of ‘melodrama or of tragedy’: ‘but actors could hardly get that point across, and this is one of many occasions ...”

“... au Magistrat’, though without saying where or when. I am grateful to the sharp eyes of Andrew Wilson, who spotted the Mountjoy reference by chance (or by alphabetical serendipity: he was researching a family ancestor called Merryweather) and kindly shared it with me. The story, such as it can be reconstructed, is contained in two sets of court ...”

“... as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of 1912 proposed to renew entrepreneurial opportunities through anti-trust and regulatory policies. He recalls a certain kind of populist progressive: distrustful of big business but also of big government, except as a regulator ...”

“... field. With his going, there was only Leon Edel (who in due course encouraged his colleague Gay Wilson Allen to write William James: A Biography, which appeared in 1967). Edel was at first going to produce an edition of Henry James’s letters, but decided to delay for over twenty-five years while he put out his four biographical volumes, edited The Diary ...”

“... 1000 ad, looking back to the glories of King Edgar’s day. After the Spithead Mutiny of 1797, Edmund Burke moaned: ‘Our only hope is a submission to the enemy … as to our navy, that has already perished with its discipline for ever.’ Only eight years later came Trafalgar, the most thumping victory ever at sea. The movement from neglect and despair ...”