“... intended for the discussion of biblical prophecy, with evangelicals including the charismatic Edward Irving. Dodsworth combined their sense of living in an oppressive world about to be dramatically interrupted with Irving’s idea that the sacraments were not so much acts of memorial as events that allowed one to participate in the sole reality that would ...”

“... interested in the origins of Aids, and was a keen supporter of the conspiracy theory championed by Edward Hooper, which suggested that an early polio vaccine programme in the Congo had inadvertently introduced HIV from chimps into the human population on a massive scale. Hamilton had written a preface for Hooper’s book, The River, and, perhaps recalling his ...”

“... most able classical scholar of a Westminster generation which included the imperfectly educated Edward Gibbon, who would later prove sympathetic to the public plight of an exschoolfellow. It was also classically-educated administrators, rather more than the last Viceroy (an inept naval cadet), who would eventually oversee the immediately post-colonial ...”

“... anatomically perplexing ‘The wicked backslide from the very womb’ (58). But fortunately, as Edward Dahlberg once remarked, ‘there are many psalms that even the droning of a priest cannot kill.’ As one reads along, the suspicion grows that perhaps this book is not about the poetry at all, but about the commentary. Usually half, and sometimes more, of ...”

“... hands are always the same. The second comes during ‘Molasses to Rum’, chillingly delivered by Edward Rutledge, the delegate from South Carolina who will not vote for independence until an anti-slavery clause is removed from the declaration. He leaps up on a table and becomes the auctioneer, the room goes red like something laid open, and this is the ...”

“... to make a name for himself in the history of religion. Another friend, the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, had convinced him that myths originated independently around the world in the thought processes of ‘savage’ peoples. Such speculations contradicted the theories of Friedrich Max Müller, the comparative philologist who then dominated ...”

“... Mungo Park on Central Africa, James Cook and Joseph Banks on the Pacific Islands, William Jones on India – and shared their assumptions about civilisational development. Progress was measured by the extent to which a society exploited its land efficiently, and by the relative predominance of preventive over positive checks. Hunter-gatherers and ...”

“... Indian middle class and members of the British scholarly and administrative classes. William Jones, whose researches at the Fort William College in Calcutta were largely responsible for inaugurating Orientalist scholarship and the reconstruction of Indian history, wore native clothes made of muslin in the heat – the solar hat and khaki uniform that ...”

“... I’ve sat on the lawn reading the Block Prince’s Register and other sources for the reign of Edward III. On Tuesday I took a complete holiday. Taking sandwiches I left college at 8.40 a.m., called for Rowse at All Souls, and walked through the early morning sunshine to the station. There we took the train to South Leigh. It was ten by the time we arrived ...”

“... frequently during his professorial year in America in 1932-33 was not Browning, or even Dante, but Edward Lear. Lear’s genius for names – from the Quangle Wangle to the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò – had captivated Eliot from childhood, and he had imitated Lear in his pencil-written magazine of 1899, the Fireside. The ten-year-old Eliot had made up distinctive ...”

“... manor house, home of the Horners. Opposite the church door is Munnings’s equestrian statue of Edward Horner, its Lutyens plinth like a smaller Cenotaph, though how the dates compare I’m not sure. But it’s only the most striking of First War mementoes in a church that is virtually a shrine: nearby is the white-painted wooden cross erected on Horner’s ...”

“... of the difference between a ‘life of purity’, such as he found exemplified by the poet David Jones when visiting him in a Harrow lodging-house with Stephen Spender, and the ‘many lives of pastiche’. But he is aware of the origin of his woes. From 4 October 1953: ‘My deepest problem. I have changed families and at a terrible cost substituted my ...”

“... Beardsley told Smithers that the Peacock should ‘untiringly and unflinchingly attack the Burne-Jones and Morrisian medieval business’. Beardsley was committed to ‘usurpation’: he was determined to use the work of his elders and betters in his own manner, cleverly transporting it into a new and original style of his own – to outdo Morris at being ...”

“... white settlers from Rhodesia or Kenya could keep their ‘unfettered’ right of entry.Claudia Jones, the Trinidadian activist who founded Britain’s first major black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette, called the 1962 act a ‘colour-bar’ law which imposed ‘second-class citizenship … at a time when apartheid and racialism is under attack ...”

“... The Inklings, though, was the best club, and superseded all others. It was founded in Oxford by Edward Lean, the younger brother of the film director David Lean, and was dedicated to the reading and discussion of creative work in progress. When Lean graduated, Lewis took it over. The group was for men only. (Dorothy L. Sayers, a keen Christian and an ...”