“... though he added: ‘To be sure, I’ve got nothing to say.’ And on another occasion he told Edmund Gosse it was only the dunces who ‘fancy it is the thought that makes poetry live; it isn’t, it’s the form, but we mustn’t tell them so, they wouldn’t know what we meant.’ Among the dunces must be counted his adoring friends in Cambridge, the ...”

“... words on the page. One of the miniature masterpieces in Wu’s new edition is the sketch of John Wilson Croker, a Tory functionary and ‘a moving nausea, with whose stomach nothing agrees’. That’s one reason Hazlitt can’t stomach him; another is that he ‘affects literature, and fancies he writes like Tacitus, by leaving out the conjunction ...”

“... the Spectator. Carey’s cousins in populism sometimes include Simon Jenkins, Paul Johnson, A.N. Wilson and the late Auberon Waugh. An easy moralism animates this worldview. Picasso was a pig; Edmund Gosse was ‘a bore’; D.H. Lawrence hit Frieda and wanted to exterm-inate whole races; Virginia Woolf was a pretentious ...”

“... no such thing. Societies are defined as such by the observer, and (as was forcibly argued by Sir Edmund Leach in his Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in 1976) it was a mistake of Radcliffe-Brown’s to imply that either societies or species are entities unproblematically given in nature. There is a host of examples in the historical and ethnographic record of ...”

“... The family’s summer neighbour was the country’s best-known political scientist, Woodrow Wilson. When she arrived at Barnard as an undergraduate, it seemed only natural that young Margaret would gravitate toward the social sciences as a way to put herself to some do-gooding purpose. At the age of 21, she married an idealistic divinity student, Luther ...”

“... scarce (in 1942, according to a survey, many children did not believe that bananas were real): Edmund’s Turkish Delight stands in for every lost and longed-for glory. What child forgets the seismically disappointing discovery that the English version tastes like jellied flowers dusted in soap powder?What else did I long for as a child? I wanted action. I ...”

“... in being a part of the illegal musical underground. (One of them, a young Canadian called Paul Wilson, who had come to Prague to teach English, is the translator of Letters to Olga.) Together with the philosopher Jan Patocka and Jiri Hajek, Foreign Minister in Dubcek’s cabinet, Havel was arrested in January 1977, after founding Charter 77, the group ...”

“... At the opposite extreme of his revolution satires is the cartoon showing just two sombre figures, Edmund Burke and the Reverend Dr Richard Price. It was Price’s republican sermon ‘On the Love of Our Country’ that had given Burke the pretext for his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Gillray entitled his double portrait Smelling out a Rat; – or ...”

“... the war. Here change is decisive. Faust opens her chapter on ‘accounting’ with a remark by Edmund Whitman, a former army quartermaster who became responsible for setting up the National Cemetery System, itself a wholly new enterprise: ‘Such a consecration of a nation’s power and resources to a sentiment’ – he was speaking of the ...”

“... a coincidence for them to take. The idea that it was ‘built in 1147’ is equally silly.Run into Edmund White, who tells me what a revelation Beyond the Fringe was when he saw it in New York in 1963, how sophisticated it seemed and how camp. He ends up by asking me, as Harold Wilson once did: ‘Were you one of the ...”

“... fiercely and accuse each other of all sorts of things while not really settling the problem.’ ‘Edmund Wilson says somewhere that the reason poets dislike each other’s books is because they seem wrong, false – a kind of lie,’ John replied. ‘If you were telling the truth you would be writing the same poems as me.’ So the world that Wright knew ...”