“... legitimate daughter would not have married a man like Evans, so was she perhaps a mulatto, with a white planter for a father and a black African mother? Though Milbourne’s family were good at documenting themselves, she seems to have slipped through their net. Her memorial tablet in a church in Kent described her simply as ‘a good Christian wife and ...”

“... I do not resent it. I look upon it as very natural.’ In the face of attacks from the likes of Edmund Wilson (who called him ‘a half-trashy novelist who writes badly, but is patronised by half-serious readers who do not care much about writing’), Maugham could, and did, point to his supersized audience, implying that you’d have to be very serious ...”

“... the Crown. Psychological boundaries came into existence, to reinforce the physical ones – the ‘White’ and ‘Black’ town – that were already there. The social and racial structure of the India Kipling was born in and later returned to as a journalist was determined by the Mutiny and, later, by the defeat of the Ilbert Bill, which would have given ...”

“... with their daughter, Harriet, Lowell began seeing a young poetry student who looked, according to Edmund Wilson, ‘like a Renoir’. On one occasion, the girl played hostess at their house in Boston, while Hardwick retreated upstairs to cry. Bishop cut short a visit in the summer of 1947 after Lowell began declaring that he was in love with her. When the ...”

“... debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture ...”

“... standing as well as commercial success, was complicated. In 1922 Fitzgerald took himself off to White Bear Lake in Minnesota, near his home city of St Paul, and in June of that year, while correcting proofs for Tales of the Jazz Age, began work on ‘something new – something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned’. This work, a ...”

“... she deserves, they’re off to their favourite café, the Gran Italia, where they ‘drank dry white capri iced in a bucket’. Months pass, and many glasses, before they go to the races and have ‘a whiskey and soda apiece’. My love for the book only increases as it gets a little closer to Brief Encounter. ‘I guess we’re both conceited,’ I ...”

“... children’s books have often taught other truths – that the best thing you can be is white, upper or middle class, and if you are a girl, quiet. Many have taught children to revere the aristocracy, conquer the wilderness and condescend to the poor. Our girl heroes have nearly always been thin, and their thinness offered as a shorthand for their ...”

“... beside your lamp, there citron to nibbleAnd coffee dribble … Frost is in the stubble.Then came Edmund Wilson’s essay ‘Flaubert’s Politics’, which ends with this sentence: ‘As the first big cracks begin to show in the structure of the 19th century, [Flaubert] shifts his complaint to the shortcomings of humanity, for he is unable to believe in, or ...”

“... the prettiest name’), but quickly the images darken. Mangrove roots, ‘when dead’, ‘strew white swamps with skeletons’, and turtles ‘die and leave their barnacled shells on the beaches,/and their large white skulls with round eye-sockets/twice the size of a man’s’. In the poem’s second half, there are ...”

“... and the redefinition is there in the News Letter editorial’s ‘new-sprung modern light’, as Edmund Burke would put it. Something is flying off and out of the caked nest, and it’s not crying ‘yarr yarr yarr’. The comfort blanket is being chucked away. On the Shankill Road, the Ulster Independence Centre has a placard saying ‘One Island, Two ...”

“... and ‘the’ room, always so called; upstairs, two rooms for sleeping. Up there on the big white bed peacefully smoothed out lies the corpse arranged with crossed hands between four calm candles – the light we saw from across the heather-covered valley. Downstairs, the kitchen is full of his happy friends, chatting ...”

“... des anciens Scandinaves. But ‘berserkers’ did not appear till 1822, though by 1879 Edmund Gosse could call someone ‘a dangerous old literary bersark to the last’. The unstable quality of that last affectionate reference is evident very early on in the ‘reception history’ of Edda and saga, perhaps especially in England though more ...”

“... after Labour’s defeat in the 1970 General Election did Benn break with the Wilsonian agenda. The white heat of the technological revolution had cooled. Benn did not dissimulate his ambition to lead the Labour Party, and as late as 1975 Wilson could flatter and cajole Benn by saying: ‘I’ve got to do this. When you have my job, you’ll have to do ...”

“... Satanic Verses, and those many historical victims of Western culture who advocate expunging Dead White Males and their views from academic curricula. Relationships between art and evil ideas (and practices too) should of course be elucidated, but ought we to ban Edmund Spenser for his genocidal views of the Irish, or ...”