“... lives, in idyllic La Jolla just north of San Diego. Marlowe remained in LA. The author who once said he ‘lived on the edge of nothing’ gave that existence to his protagonist, in whom were combined the drinker of Chandler’s successful, social Twenties and the itinerant, lonely, anonymous man of the Depression decade; eliminating Cissy from Marlowe’s ...”

“... in the last weeks of 1962, I found a bottle of wine in the vacated room, with a note underneath. Edward Thompson had been completing The Making of the English Working-Class. He lived in Halifax, and needed a final couple of weeks in the British Museum. In those days I lived in Talbot Road, newly wed to Juliet Mitchell. She was teaching in Leeds, while I was ...”

“... on the Russian economy. In a widely cited estimate, crooked officials and plain gangsters are said to have sent as much as $100 billion into their foreign bank accounts since 1990, depriving the Russian economy of much more hard currency than the sum total of post-1990 Western aid. Countless newspaper articles have profiled the unappealing beneficiaries ...”

“... Farouq, a charming and erudite Moroccan working in an internet café but versed in the thought of Edward Said and Paul de Man, who makes the case for al-Qaida, or at least contests the case against it. In some sense he wants to recruit Julius to an Islamic worldview, if not an Islamic world order, but Julius sees through his persuasiveness to the rage ...”

“... and encountered the same difficulty in tackling home subjects. He was certainly not the last. Edward Hopper made only three trips to Europe – in 1906, 1909 and 1910. He said that when he returned from France, America ‘seemed a chaos of ugliness’, and later that ‘it seemed awfully raw here when I got back. It ...”

“... Edward Stobart owns the largest independent haulage firm in Britain. A stammering farm child who hated school and left without paper qualifications, he worked all hours to set up his company, spending the weekends obsessively cleaning his lorries. A typical Saturday night out would be to somewhere ‘like Beattock, eating egg and chips in a transport caff, having tipped a load at Motherwell ...”

“... E.P. Thompson, historian and peacemaker, known as Edward to his friends, died at his home near Worcester in 1993. Four years on, Beyond the Frontier is a volume of material set aside far earlier. Indeed, there occurs in it a passing reference to ‘the raw material for half-finished books on William Blake and Customs in Common’, works long since published ...”

“... understated the case. If one goes by the records, slowly unearthed in the Twenties and Thirties by Edward Cobb, Edward Hicks and A.C. Baugh, the Malory of Newbold Revel was not ‘little better than a criminal’, he was a criminal, and probably by some way the most distinguished criminal ever to have won a place in English ...”

“... and printers is superior to the nonsense produced by an editor and a computer. Kidd hasn’t said how he might proceed if he were to edit Ulysses, but someone else could easily put together a text based on the principles implied in Kidd’s essays, lectures and interviews. The resulting Ulysses would look a lot like the 1922 edition, perhaps with the ...”

“... how they Suffer in Prison Alone Their Friends Unavenged and their Country Unfreed: Oh Bitter I said is the Patriot’s Mead. When the news of the killing of eight IRA men and one civilian at Loughgall came through to the H-blocks at the Maze, there were more than a few who counted themselves lucky to be suffering in prison, rather than tasting the bitter ...”

“... of using the subsequent discussion to take her ‘down a peg or two’, as one participant said. Brittain, who had served as a nurse in France and Malta, dwelt on the narrowness of student life. Winifred Holtby, the only other woman to have served during the war and returned to the college, responded ‘in the words of Rosalind in As You Like ...”

“... R. George Thomas is a cautious man. His life of Edward Thomas (no relation) is ‘a portrait’ not ‘a biography’. Maybe this is just as well. The poet was a cautious man too. He was also a scrupulous one, and when we read in the first few pages that research for this book began ‘in the early 1960s’, we are encouraged to feel that author and subject are kindred spirits ...”

“... was five and not in the direct line of succession. Finding himself at the age of 41 seated on Edward I’s coronation chair in Westminster Abbey amid ‘the red, the gold, the gilt, the grandeur’, he was full of nerves and foreboding. ‘This is absolutely terrible,’ he wrote with engaging candour to his cousin. ‘I’m only a naval officer, it’s ...”

“... of his often brilliant observations about nuclear weapons (the 1955 ‘Balance of Terror’ speech said it all) is that he deplored them more than most people, as the final and complete ruination not just of mere boring peace, but of the splendid (non-nuclear) warfare he had known and loved so well – for not even Churchill foresaw the emergence of the ...”

“... Edward​ III liked to dress up as a bird. In 1348, at a tournament in Bury St Edmunds, he revealed himself as a gleaming pheasant with copper-pipe wings and real feathers. The next year, celebrating Christmas with the archbishop of Canterbury, he wore a white buckram harness spangled with three hundred leaves of silver, adorned with one of his mottoes: ‘Hay hay the wythe swan/by godes soule I am thy man ...”