“... 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 ...”

“... 417 pages readers may discover sketches for a major revaluation of utopian socialism (by Stedman Jones), significant new contributions to the debate on the origins of modern capitalism (by Hans Medick), a first-hand account of what history means for working coal-miners (by Dave Douglass), pioneer studies of the Scottish peasantry (by Ian Carter), an ...”

“... paranoia, and – in particular – of the ministrations of Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, who was on the payroll of United Fruit, one of the US’s largest corporations.The players are exaggerated, almost parodic, even in the history books. There is the adman making a pitch to get involved in ...”

“... Before dawn​ on 21 February 1803, the day of Colonel Edward Marcus Despard’s execution, London’s entire armed forces were on full alert. Every member of the Bow Street, Queen Street and Hatton Garden militias, along with numerous petty constables from the outlying boroughs, was placed on duty in ‘all the public houses and other places of resort for the disaffected ...”

“... pereo,’ traditionally rendered as ‘What an artist perishes with me,’ Holland, following Edward Champlin, translates as: ‘That I should die a mere artisan!’ As Nero speaks the phrase, he is digging his own grave, trying to build himself a tomb, a sorry mockery of the Domus Aurea, the enormous palace he had constructed on the ashes of the great ...”

“... somewhere between literary respectability and bestsellerdom: John O’Hara, Nelson Algren, James Jones, John Hersey. Parini declares in a fighting Afterword that answers to the Steinbeck question ‘spring to mind’. Clearly the answer which springs highest and most persistently is intellectual snobbery. Steinbeck’s low status is ascribed to the ...”

“... to Be Lett. In 1748 Fielding, who wrote political journalism with one hand while composing Tom Jones with the other, put a more positive gloss on the mobility of authors by likening them to other professional advocates, such as lawyers. Periods of national emergency were another matter, but in the absence of disinterested patronage, and ‘when the ...”

“... that ‘it would sound like a circus.’ It was her second book. The first, a life of Burne-Jones, appeared two years earlier, in 1975, when she was nearly 60. Until then child-rearing, teaching, a difficult marriage and the constant struggle to keep the family afloat – which failed several times, once literally when their houseboat sank in the Thames ...”

“... habits of early 20th-century London. The paper’s first lead review was of More Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, done by Augustine Birrell, a barrister, a Liberal MP, and the author of a volume of essays entitled Obiter Dicta. The first poem was by Harold Begbie. It was an anthem for Empire, and May succinctly describes it as ‘rather an absurd ...”

“... that Darwin stole the idea of transmutation through natural selection from the Calcutta naturalist Edward Blyth, and then tried to cover his tracks. Wilson quotes Blyth selectively from a tendentious source, but if he had consulted the original he would have seen that far from anticipating Darwin, Blyth maintained that ‘Providence’ works to preserve the ...”

“... famous Herball, which listed the medicinal properties of a vast number of plants. Richard Jones, a landscape historian, has traced one surviving copy back to a gentry family, the Coopers of Thurgarton in Nottinghamshire. His analysis of the 244 manicules (pointing hands) drawn in the book suggests its owner had a keen interest in siege-related ...”

“... offered. It may be, for instance, that a deaf viewer watching a properly captioned print of, say, Edward Scissorhands, will identify with difference as expressed in a strongly poetic register. Something similar might even apply to the sequences in Planet of the Apes where Charlton Heston is abused by monkeys who refuse to understand what he’s ...”

“... killing of King Richard II’. Fourth, at Meyrick’s trial on 5 March, the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, asserted that ‘the story of Henry IV being set forth in a play, and in that play there being set forth the killing of the King upon the stage’, Meyrick and his fellows had had ‘the play of Henry IV’ performed. Finally, a Government ...”

“... one too – that way Mary’s cause for jealousy would be removed. Sixty years later, talking to Edward Silsbee, Claire still put those two elements together. Pale Mary had been jealous of her ‘bright colour’, of the attention Shelley paid her and the hours he spent walking with her. After her adventure with Byron, she told Silsbee rather glibly, ‘Mrs ...”