“... 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 ...”

“... In​ 1930, Edmund Wilson went on the road for the New Republic. He covered striking textile workers in Massachusetts, militant miners in West Virginia and suicides in industrial cities. His pieces concerned social conflict and ruined lives, but Wilson had a deep interest in the new industrial world that was still taking shape ...”

“... was a simple affair in an unassuming ‘colonial style’; in fact, it was modelled on the White House. She modestly recalls someone addressing her as ‘the most intelligent and responsive person I’ve ever met’. From her own account, she impressed Einstein, charmed Göring and captivated Shaw. Often she seems to be providing a textbook example of ...”

“... at birth with some presentiment of loss.We catch another glimpse of Quintana, aged three, in The White Album, this time at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, ‘blonde and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei’. Didion reports that Quintana wanted to go to the beach. ‘She cannot go to the beach,’ she writes, ‘because there has been an ...”

“... They were waiting to catch a bus near the Well Hall Roundabout in Eltham, South London. A group of white youths ran across the road without warning. Stephen Lawrence was stabbed twice. Duwayne Brooks heard the remark ‘What? What? Nigger!’ as the youths approached. From here on, there is no consensus; everything is subject to ...”

“... This secret source of strength is the absolute omnipotence, the sovereignty of Parliament.’But Edmund Burke didn’t talk like this at all – and yet most of our modern Conservative thinkers fancy themselves as Burkeans. What Burke said was that in making our political arrangements ‘we compensate, we reconcile, we balance.’ What successful nations ...”

“... company of a Choctaw called Push-ma-ta-ha. With his enthusiasm for Shakespeare rekindled by seeing Edmund Kean performing on one of his American tours, the 21-year-old Forrest made an impressive New York debut as Othello in 1826, but the move back East did nothing to dampen his Jacksonian patriotism. He had himself listed on playbills as ‘The Native ...”

“... she did expect to have again eight yards of fine cloth, the list of the said run web being all white, but … Thompson did bring [her] a much coarser woollen web with a black list, [she] being very certain that it was not her web.’ Once woven, the cloth had to be ‘litted’ or dyed – the spinster Jane Browne was hired to dye some wool green, blue or ...”

“... wife of a young colleague at Princeton. The affair generated a sequence of 115 sonnets produced at white heat over the course of the year. There are quite a few gracefully rendered and successful 20th-century sonnets that cleave to the Italian, as in this case, or Elizabethan model, and many more that play with or deviate from that strict form in interesting ...”

“... 1000 ad, looking back to the glories of King Edgar’s day. After the Spithead Mutiny of 1797, Edmund Burke moaned: ‘Our only hope is a submission to the enemy … as to our navy, that has already perished with its discipline for ever.’ Only eight years later came Trafalgar, the most thumping victory ever at sea. The movement from neglect and despair ...”

“... symposium ‘on the Negro’. (Symposia on the Negro were popular in the 1960s, helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to attend the symposium itself but, never one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s ...”

“... a letter excerpted in the notes, Thomas distances himself from ‘the Master’. What a shame that Edmund Morgan, having learned so much from Freud, forgot to mention him in his work on the Puritan family. As for E.R. Dodds, it’s unscrupulous of Gay to offer his Greeks and the Irrational as exemplary Freudian scholarship when its debts to Nietzsche and ...”

“... premiere of The Rake’s Progress – one finds that the boon-companions were Peter Bartok, Edmund Wilson, Fritz Reiner, Rudolph Bing, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Paco Lagerstrom, Auden, Kallman, Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Stravinsky was, however, saddled at this time as on several occasions with the chaotic if aristocratic poet Edward James (whose laugh ...”