“... Asked​ in an exam at the age of 16 whether kings should be elected, the future Edward VII answered: ‘It is better than hereditary right because you have more chance of having a good sovereign, if it goes by hereditary right if you have a bad or weak sovereign, you cannot prevent him reigning.’ By Bertie’s feeble standards, this was a flash of insight ...”

“... Old Man to be, cannot be answered without drawing on a mass of poems and plays. The same could be said for the destructive passion that Yeats came to regard as integral to old age. Almost despite its detail, The Arch-Poet keeps showing how creative Yeats found the synergy between ageing and hatred. He had been imagining what it would mean to be old since he ...”

“... courage’ in the First World War, winning a croix de guerre avec palme, and, it’s said, forcing men over the top at the point of his officer’s revolver.) Few now would describe Richard in quite these terms, but still, as Fletcher very fairly observes, ‘over the years, Richard II’s unmanly character has provided the cement with which ...”

“... REMEMBER, IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING, HE WAS A GREAT MAN.’ At the end of his authorised biography of Edward Heath, Ziegler writes: ‘He was a great man, but his blemishes, though far less considerable, were quite as conspicuous as his virtues, and it is too often by his blemishes that he is remembered.’ In the case of Mountbatten, we were to understand, it ...”

“... his life took place before he was born. He was the great-grandchild of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones, and was thus connected with both the Kipling and the Baldwin families; he was the grandson of an Oxford Professor of Poetry (of no great distinction, it must be admitted); and the son of Angela Thirkell, the novelist of upper-class English ...”

“... turned empty phrases inside out. The goat-like satyr on the front cover of Die Fackel suggests, as Edward Timms says, ‘that for the Kraus of the 1890s satire was a vaguely defined primitive force disrupting the civilities of a philistine society.’ But as the political situation worsened, Kraus embarked on the graver, more apocalyptic project of seeing the ...”

“... That is the way things happen,’ Auden writes in ‘Memorial for the City’, a poem Edward Mendelson dates from June 1949,                           for ever and everPlum-blossom falls on the dead, the roar of the waterfall coversThe cries of the whipped and the sighs of the loversAnd the hard bright light composesA meaningless moment into an eternal factWhich a whistling messenger disappears with into a defile:One enjoys glory, one endures shame;He may, she must ...”

“... did not gain a decisive momentum in literature until the end of the 18th century. Coleridge said that what he had most admired about Wordsworth’s early poems was their ‘original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents and situations’. Empson thought that too much ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... names of other letter-writers already enshrined in volume form – Carlyle, whom Lytton Strachey said was ‘too long’, and Swift, whom the same authority qualified, with characteristic wrong-headedness one may think, or indeed impertinence, as ‘too dry’. These two are going to be amusing. It is hard to avoid the impression that they are not so much ...”

“... endless discontent; with remorse, thrown in, for the massacre of so many good intentions.’ To Edward Garnett, 29 March 1898: ‘I assure you – speaking soberly and on my word of honour – that sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I ...”

“... allusion to Cobbett’s Rural Rides, lacking the alliterative euphony of the original. What Edward Pearce of the Guardian offers is a record of his 19 days on the road during the General Election, visiting as many constituencies, each time in the company of a particular candidate, of varying party. There are glimpses of the circumstances of its ...”

“... German peasant woman ambling towards us with a very white face. My mate Fergus sniggered. He said she had funny wee shoes and legs. I have a feeling she may not remember how the conversation went, but I recorded it for posterity in the back of a school jotter the next day. The Queen: ‘Very hot, isn’t it?’ Fergus: ‘Roastin’.’ The Queen: ‘And ...”

“... esteemed royal generation in recent history. Think of the Prince of Wales who eventually became Edward VII: he, too, enjoyed the gaming tables, was a serial and incorrigible adulterer, and found his friends among the fast set, whose morals were as loose as his own. Think of the Prince of Wales who briefly became ...”

“... points south as places of leisure and relaxation which for fifty weeks of the year can scarcely be said to exist at all. According to this view, the poetry associated with Mediterranean and Caribbean countries must always be off the literary map: one can expect very little from books with titles like The Fortunate Traveller (Derek Walcott), Sun Poem (...”