“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... deep shade, demoted to the background of the picture, their way barred by the crowded diggings. A young lady distributes tracts. A crazed herb-seller moves anxiously forward. Carlyle himself is there, on the sidelines, looking curiously furtive. Central to the picture is its heroine, her poised gesture reflecting that of the valiant workman who stands behind ...”

“... Hamish McIlwraith), angst (Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers), the limits of reason (Edward de Bono, The Five-Day Course in Thinking). The do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do drive in Western culture is indeed ancient, and has surprisingly widespread roots. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing is Melissa Bank’s first book. It comes to Britain from ...”

“... India, pauperism in England, disturbance and disorder in Europe, and robbery everywhere’. As a young woman she worked to relieve the potato famine of 1898, and later spent most of her fairly ample fortune in attempts to alleviate the routine cruelties of British rule. Francis Stuart, who at 17 married Maud’s daughter Iseult and was himself a fair hater ...”

“... to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognised the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. A fondness for playing roles ran in the family. His father, John Ross, tall, good-looking and a bit of a dandy, spent twenty years failing to complete a Life of ...”

“... too long unmarried daughter, the whale washed up on the Norfolk coast, the family scandal when the young Margery Paston fell in love with the bailiff and married him. It’s enthralling material, and good for a few historical novels along the way; but it’s not, as Castor demonstrates, what the story of the Pastons is actually about. The many collections or ...”