“... 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 ...”

“... often touched on the long-standing anxiety that trouble in the colonies would come home to roost. Edmund Burke, writing at the end of the 18th century during an earlier imperial crisis, warned that unless Parliament restrained the East India Company ‘the breakers of the law in India’ could become ‘the makers of law in England’. The agents of imperial ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... come in? Early on he became interested in comparative anthropology thanks to Meyer Fortes and Edmund Leach at Cambridge. He acquired the idea of a historical anthropology from Jean-Pierre Vernant in Paris. Twenty years ago he took up ancient Chinese science. He has since become the world’s foremost contributor to studies comparing aspects of ancient ...”

“... absence. But in that case, Fanny wouldn’t join her household and would miss daily contact with Edmund, who notices her and then doesn’t, releasing an important dramatic energy into the book. So Austen has to have Lady Bertram be there and not there at the very same time; she has to give her characteristics which are essentially neutral. Since her husband ...”

“... Panter-Downes, London correspondent for the New Yorker, put it) would be impossible to say. When Edmund Wilson visited England in 1956 he was struck by how well-regulated life seemed: ‘In spite of the developments since the last war,’ he wrote, ‘the social system is still largely taken for granted, and it is soothing for an American to arrive in a ...”

“... the pharmacist had hung an empty wasps’ nest from a shelf: small, exquisite, clean matte white, and hard as stucco. I admired it so much he gave it to me. The wasps’ nest, rather than the map or the Atlantic Ocean, is now Bishop’s symbolic equivalent for art: an organic form (unlike her former inorganic monument in the poem of that ...”

“... the era of the Civil War. We therefore need to recalibrate our assessment of the violence between white protagonists so as to open our eyes to the far darker realities of ethnic division. And furthermore – though he doesn’t quite say as much – he seems to think that by putting the Civil War in its proper place on the scale of destruction we can also ...”

“... a reader might expect to meet in the sort of ghost story where sceptical explanations are absent? Edmund Wilson advanced a version of the projective view, while F.R. Leavis – in the course of a ‘disagreement’ with Marius Bewley on the subject which is contained in Bewley’s The Complex Fate – came out on the other side. Leavis thinks of the tale as a ...”

“... stuff on the Georgians, to whom he attached himself through the early influence of Eddie Marsh and Edmund Gosse (correspondingly they did not much care for the raw tone of his war poetry). But it was Sassoon’s own inclination to look back to lost worlds and the happy days of his youth that kept him so stubbornly hostile to T.S. Eliot and to Modernism in ...”

“... permission. It was the first violation.When Diana drove to St Paul’s she was a blur of virginal white behind glass. The public was waiting to see the dress, but this was more than a fashion moment. An everyday sort of girl had been squashed into the coach, but a goddess came out. She didn’t get out of the coach in any ordinary way: she hatched. The ...”

“... botany and worried constantly about her workload, complaining that she has ‘to keep on like the White Queen to stay in the same place’. When she got a B- in her first English paper, it made her feel ‘slightly sick’. She dated with the fervour of a boy-crazy 18-year-old. ‘Oh dear will a nice freshman boy never give me a tumble?’ she sighed in a ...”

“... her pregnant; a black baby is born, but spirited away and replaced with a child bought from a poor white woman. Ibrahim is recalled to Russia by Tsar Peter, who dotes on him, and is matched up by the monarch with a bride, a boyar’s daughter, Natalya Rzhevskaya, who has a lost love of her own. At this point, 29 Penguin Classic pages after it starts, the work ...”

“... the Porsche again today. He liked the Porsche.Equipped with my latex gloves, disposable balaclava, white helmet and sunglasses, I followed my roadside assistant to the F430. He leaned in and shunted the driver’s seat all the way back. (‘Aren’t you a bit tall for a sports car?’ someone had said to me before I went, but I thought I’d be all ...”

“... would comfort the dying more often than saving the living. But the deeper purpose was moral: the white-uniformed nurses would serve as emblems of moral courage and symbols of Allied values, their femininity contrasting with the masculinity defined by the Totenkopf and the black uniforms of the SS. Naturally, Weil wanted to be among the first nurses ...”