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“... one reads for their own sakes, as one does the letters of Madame de Sevigné, Madame du Deffand, Edward Fitzgerald – or indeed of William Cowper, the new edition of whose Letters and Prose Writings has just reached its fourth volume. Yet Hardy’s letters are admirable in their way, laconic and to the point, written with his eye on the spirit-level, as ...”

“... salary at the bank. Thayer’s manner could be remote and imperious, but Freud, who analysed him, said he had a ‘most gentle heart’. He was willing to reward talent even when a work didn’t take his fancy, and he rarely tried to take the credit for other people’s success. A friend described Thayer’s commitment to art as so earnest that he ‘remained ...”

“... in the limitation of its address to readers who are already culturally privileged. The work, she said, is ‘unlikely to penetrate average Australia’, dominated as it still is by racist mythologies. Stuart Macintyre, discussing the whole project, put it succinctly: ‘It’s not easy to do justice to the underdog in a volume with gold-blocked ...”

“... of something nasty in the soul, but without the bugaboo anonymity of Conrad’s natives. Edward Williams, the reformist slave-owner, finds out that his favourite exslave, Nash Williams, has disappeared into the Liberian interior, and comes over to find him. We learn about Nash from a series of increasingly piteous letters sent by him to ...”

“... its elegance is one of the main reasons why Fredkin believes in it. And Fredkin does believe. Like Edward Wilson and Kenneth Boulding, the two other scientist-visionaries whose lives and theories are examined in Robert Wright’s Three Scientists and their Gods, Fredkin has devoted himself to finding a theory that explains it all, that brings everything ...”

“... story about withdrawing from society, and about going out walking. It is narrated by a man called Edward Buckmaster, who, as the novel opens, has been living on his own in an isolated farmhouse for just over a year. The reasons he gives for cutting himself off from the world he used to belong to – one in which he was forced to endure ‘office ...”

“... About ten years ago, I heard Edward Thompson give a public lecture at Harvard University. He was not then an internationally renowned spokesman for the peace movement: there was at that point no peace movement of any consequence to be a spokesman for. He was, however, one of the most influential historians of his time ...”

“... Morton (a journalist friend of Thackeray), Augustus Noel Follin (a businessman from Cincinnati), Edward Payson Willis (a literary black sheep) and, most scandalously of all, King Ludwig of Bavaria, whose long entanglement with Lola brought disgrace, in the opinion of many, on the city of Munich. ‘What a hold this miserable witch has obtained over this ...”

“... I too work hard, Mrs Oliphant,’ said Queen Victoria to the Scottish novelist. Mrs Oliphant was famous for her productivity. She published biographies of Edward Irving and the Comte de Montalembert, a literary history of England and more than sixty fat novels.* From the mid-1850s until her death in 1897 she contributed half a dozen essays a year to Blackwood’s Magazine, delivering on Bunsen, Savonarola, Queen Anne, Marco Polo and Jesus Christ ...”

“... of interest only to other editors, who have to take the trouble of reading it. But it has to be said that one can’t imagine that readers who lack interest in the scholarly minutiae will choose to read the novels in this form. The Todd-Bree volume on the later manuscripts runs to about 800 pages, of which only some 200 are by Jane Austen. The most ...”

“... male peacock has never had a free pass. ‘Of all handicrafts,’ the satirical magazine the Town said in 1838, ‘that of tailoring appears to be the most successful in the way of coining money. We might compare it to witchcraft.’ According to Bespoke: The Men’s Style of Savile Row by James Sherwood, even Queen Victoria got in on the act, writing to her ...”

“... Uno and other mass-market cars were turned into spare parts for resale all over Italy. It was, he said, ‘a question of political equilibria’. For it so happened that the Christian Democrat politician who served successive governments as Minister of the Interior, i.e. the police minister, himself came from Nocera Inferiore which, as it happens, is a major ...”

“... otherwise laudatory, attributed to Forster’s art. ‘The very poise of Mr Forster’s art,’ he said,‘has something equivocal about it – it seems to be conditioned by its not knowing what kind of poise it is.’ Quoting a paragraph from A Passage to India, about the Krishna ceremony, a paragraph in which Forster’s touch seems sure and then ...”

“... network conveniently domiciled in neutral Switzerland. ‘Austria,’ Zita was reported to have said, ‘did not desire to be ruined for the sake of saving Alsace-Lorraine for Germany.’ The Germans got wind of the intrigue and bullied the Austrian emperor into disavowing it; as a result, the German grip on the Habsburg monarchy was tightened and the ...”

“... Despite​ explicit warnings,’ Chilcot said, introducing his report, ‘the consequences of the invasion were underestimated.’ A good deal of the blame for this has to be laid at the door of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Chilcot listed four possible consequences that many people had identified before the war was launched: the risk of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional instability, and increased al-Qaida activity ...”