“... and backbiting. Should he become more of a courtier and build on his ode sung at the Coronation of Edward VII (or rather, as he observed, not sung, by a choir which gawped at the King in the procession as he left the Abbey)? No, he found the boredom of Court life unendurable, and after he had stood night after night after dinner talking in the smoking-room his ...”

“... them: ‘they destroy all one’s judgment – turn one into an ape.’ For an upper-middle-class young lady, born in the reign of Victoria, these were unusual sentiments. Song of Love provides a much clearer picture of Noel’s character than could be seen in the documents previously available. She told Rupert that when she was a child ...”

“... selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end soon. He needs cash.Howard is knowledgeable about art. He’s a serious connoisseur and collector, an expert on Wenceslaus Hollar, the prolific 17th-century Bohemian printmaker. Among his inheritance is the ...”

“... and mostly used in their calendared form) till one day ... One day in the early 1930s, a young student of Tudor England, interested especially in its language, literature and social life, came upon them and decided to do something about them. The something in question has now seen the light of day, fifty years later and in six very large ...”

“... a Sorrow the loss of them was capable of occasioning’. Hovering uneasily in the wings is one Edward Waitfort, a cautious if persistent lover who delivers ‘insolent’ lectures on her conduct and whom the widow torments by repeatedly rejecting him for other candidates. Lady Mary’s authorship of the piece – it was written in 1714 – was not made ...”

“... sympathies, as many ‘conformable puritans’ did in that period. Some biographers believe, as Edward Jones notes in his learned overview of archives relating to the young poet, that Milton lost sympathy with orthodox worship when an inspection of Horton parish church in 1637 required that the raised pew occupied by the ...”

“... of him?’ Carrère asks himself, or the reader, before whisking us back to the early 1980s, when Edward Limonov – Ukrainian émigré poet, recently down and out in New York – arrives in Paris, ‘crowned by the success of his scandalous novel, It’s Me, Eddie’. Limonov is a comet blazing across the local literary cosmos ‘where I’, Carrère tells ...”

“... Looking down rather reprovingly from the shelf opposite are the three large volumes of Edward Nehls’s Composite Biography, a version or two of Harry T. Moore’s frequently revised biography, the first and so far the only volume of the three-tier Cambridge biography, and the ample lifework of Emile Delavenay. There are more beside them, and more to come: Rosie Jackson says there are ten in progress ...”

“... myself’ – that is, bare her arms and upper bosom in public, like all those duchesses and young beauties, ‘at my age after being muffled up so many years!’ Mr C. was peremptory: ‘Eve he supposed had as much sense as I had and she wore no clothes at all!!!’ A white silk dress was duly ordered (Mr C. graciously agreed to pay) and arrived ...”

“... and never better than when she’s proposing a revaluation of someone wrongly discounted, like Edward Thomas. The first two essays in this book deal with Thomas, one relating him to Frost, the other to the English tradition – a sturdier strain of poetry than either the Georgian mode prevalent at the time Edward Thomas ...”

“... is poison. It poisons the very source of your musical growth, for it poisons the taste of the young. You cannot poison the spring of art and hope for a fresh clear stream to flow out and enrich life.’ In 1901, however, the St Louis Globe-Democrat reported the encounter between Scott Joplin and Alfred Ernst, also a German and director of the Saint Louis ...”

“... of the modern game (hence the ‘local derby’), but such was the passion for it that, from Edward II on, English kings tried to ban it. Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV all passed edicts against it (it was getting in the way of archery and other martial pursuits). In 1457, James II of Scotland decreed that ...”

“... therefore a ‘street of civic pride and pageantry’. The events of 13 October 1247, the Feast of Edward the Confessor, were ‘not untypical’, according to the authors, though it can’t have been an everyday experience to see the king dressed in sackcloth and carrying a reliquary of Christ’s blood, a gift from the patriarch of Jerusalem. Retracing his ...”

“... without the Haram al-Sharif and without a real state, or even the prospect of viable statehood. Young Palestinians have had enough and, despite Arafat’s feeble efforts to control them, have taken to the streets to throw stones and fire slingshots at Israeli Merkavas and Cobras.What Israel has depended on in the past, the ignorance, complicity or laziness ...”

“... a generous one. A good specimen of the kind of commentary on offer here is the contribution by Edward Copeland on money. Others write about domestic architecture, careers in the army, the navy, the law; manners, medicine, rank, religion, transport and so on. But let us consider money. Money was a subject of importance to gentlemen of the rank of Darcy in ...”