“... in the world of food, in a course designed to appeal to the clever and curious and artily-minded young. So here it is: SPU27, an acronym standing for Science of the Physical Universe 27. Spelled out in English, the name of the course is Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science. The person who thinks it’s funny that SPU sounds like ...”

“... Prince Consort; still less the ‘feline skill’ of Sidney Lee who, disregarding the advice of Edward VII, ‘Stick to Shakespeare, Mr Lee, there’s money in Shakespeare,’ produced a double-decker biography of his late majesty; least of all the flippant irreverences of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, which caused George V to erupt with rage. On the ...”

“... How do we know, for example, that some felt the pain of bereavement more than others? Was Sir Edward Parry the only one of whom it could be said that ‘the First World War effectively destroyed his world,’ or Leonard Woolf the only one qualifying for the remark: ‘The Second World War put paid to his hopes for international sanity’? Some ...”

“... The London Review sent out prose, and poems, from that building every fortnight, and one day a young man came to the door with a bomb strapped to his back. Standing in the square the other day, trying to ignore the statue of Mahatma Gandhi – it’s not hard to ignore, both because of its ugliness and the minatory nature of his peaceableness – I reached ...”

“... idiomatic French and Italian with perfect ease: this is the pen of an undoubtedly quick and clever young woman. She was at this time 25 and had been a widow for a year. She had lost three children, and nearly died of a miscarriage, before that. She had endured the suicides of her half-sister and of Shelley’s first wife. She had published a travel book and a ...”

“... to decline membership there for fear of shocking the ladies by her unmarried cohabitation with Edward Aveling. Perhaps not entirely genteel (Ellis marvelled at the intensity of her body odour on warm summer walks), she worked tirelessly for workers’ organisations such as the Social Democratic Federation. The Fabians, however, were indisputably genteel ...”

“... growth, like those of Madame de Sevigné, Madame du Deffand, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, Edward FitzGerald or indeed the great Swift himself. They bear the same relationship to such products as do those modern diaries like Crossman’s, written with malice aforethought and for publication, to the diaries of Pepys who did not mean to be read. This is ...”

“... endless discontent; with remorse, thrown in, for the massacre of so many good intentions.’ To Edward Garnett, 29 March 1898: ‘I assure you – speaking soberly and on my word of honour – that sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I ...”

“... In the introduction​ to A Visible Man, the mid-career autobiography of Edward Enninful, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, Enninful describes his work: ‘I’ve always answered the question of what it means to create a magazine differently … to push harder, to dream bigger.’ The rest of the book is his attempt to show what pushing harder and dreaming bigger has looked like in the thirty years since he started in fashion ...”

“... will never wear anything extravagant or slang.’ In the end she lost that battle, for Bertie, as Edward VII, went on to introduce the dinner jacket, the velvet smoking jacket, the white dresscoat and the bowler hat. He also fell in love, temporarily, with Lillie Langtry, whose velvet-slippered friend Oscar Wilde said that ‘where there is no extravagance ...”

“... revised and updated. The ‘B’ manuscript ends with the words ‘then he [King Edgar] died, then Edward, Edgar’s son succeeded, and held’ – the sentence breaks off with room still available on the page. That shows – doesn’t it? – that this text was written after 8 July 975, the day Edgar died, and before ...”

“... isn’t typical of The Arabian Nights, and the success story of Ali Baba and the romance of the young man and the fairy queen echo the extravagant and often sly fairytales – ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘The White Cat’ – that were being retrieved and written down in France by Charles Perrault and Mme d’Aulnoy in the 1690s. D’Aulnoy did, however, claim ...”

“... Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull. In sending her royal brother Edward VI her youthful likeness, soon to be hidden for ever behind the iconic mask of royalty, she apologised for her appearance, ‘the face ... I might well blush to offer’, but not for her mind, of which she would never be ashamed. It was a mind which as yet ...”

“... spiky delights. The passage follows a description of a group of servant children – ‘he’ is a young Black servant – taking the piss out of their masters and mistresses. It’s a kind of purposive fooling around that recalls the fun dances, which are also dangerous games, shared by the narrator and her friend Tracey in Swing Time (2016), or the goofing ...”

“... David Rudkin and the director Alan Clarke in which a repressed Midlands schoolboy’s visions of Edward Elgar and King Penda threaten to unlock the secrets of his own sexuality. All of these productions are considered at length in The Magic Box, Rob Young’s hefty survey of occult British film and television. ...”