“... his grandmother, but not to any of his siblings, displaced as they were around the plantation.As a young boy he was stoical and resourceful. He had a habit of singing outside the window of Lucretia Auld, his owner’s daughter – a ploy she ‘very soon came to understand as a petition for a piece of bread’. He was exposed to countless acts of brutality: a ...”

“... Last September, the Royal Society organised a conference to discuss Edward Hooper’s book The River, which promoted the theory that HIV was accidentally spread to humans from chimpanzees through a polio vaccination programme in Africa in the 1950s. Coincidentally, or not, on the eve of the conference, a British TV channel screened the 1995 Hollywood thriller Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman as a maverick military virologist given hours to find a vaccine to halt the spread of a deadly African virus in California before the military obliterates the town where it has taken hold ...”

“... a century. The story that unfolds against this background takes us from her birth, as Georgina Young, in a Hertfordshire village, through her late Victorian childhood to her appearance beside Churchill on VE day.Gray’s ability to draw on the broader context is fortunate, because there are considerable gaps in the detail. Landemare gave an interview to ...”

“... into the Weekly Illustrated, and went on to found a magazine of his own, Lilliput. He sold it to Edward Hulton, for whom he was to set up a new paper, a weekly illustrated magazine, which escaped being called Lo! and became Picture Post. Hopkinson joined Lorant when the magazine was being planned, and worked with him until Lorant went to America in ...”

“... or four, and a few never stopping at all. We know that to prepare for their great flight, the young chicks in the nest strengthen their wings from a month old by doing feathery press-ups; lifting their bodies up off the nest by pressing down on their wings, until they can hold themselves there, suspended, for several seconds. Then they’re ready.We still ...”

“... long been militating for such a memorial. The urbane Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede designed by Edward Maufe was evidently reckoned insufficiently specific. And the appetite for acknowledgment was hardly sated by the perennially defaced statue of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris outside St Clement Danes. The interesting peer of the realm Lord Ashcroft KCMG ...”

“... has been so well revived that if more of those whom I saw eating and sunning themselves had been young and bronzed, not old and white-haired, and if the pavilion was not still surrounded by the brick terraces you see in the earliest photographs, you would have guessed that the planner’s dream had been achieved. Overy quotes Earl De La Warr, the socialist ...”

“... café next door. After about five years the two elderly ladies sold out to two rather casual young men who kept the name of Legrain and the No 5 coffee. This kept me going until the war, when the two young men first closed the café and then closed the shop. They found a home for the coffee in I. Camisa, who have been ...”

“... sold; auditions held for poetry readings; invitations sent out. The result was a grand gathering. Edward de Souza read some of Shelley’s political poems with tremendous force. The winner of the audition to read ‘Men of England’ was a young black woman. Lesley Saunders, a Greenham Common campaigner and local Labour ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Even at the end of his new book, it’s not clear where Edward Luttwak is coming from, as they say in his country. He leaves no doubt, however, about where he dreads coming to. Instead of being smoothed through ‘the spotless elegance of Narita or Frankfurt or Amsterdam or Singapore’, the hapless international traveller who comes into New York’s Kennedy Airport will walk into one of the tatty terminals that near-bankrupt airlines no longer maintain, mildly surprised at the naked plywood and unfinished gypsum board ...”

“... as a paper to a Cambridge undergraduate society, and it reverberates with the mirth of upper-class young people contemplating the sordid lives of their social inferiors. One can almost hear the well-bred laughter as Woolf impersonates Arnold Bennett planning a fictional character.’ You might argue that Woolf originally wrote this essay for an American ...”

“... Pisa – shedding some members and adding others, before finally disintegrating when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822. Shortly thereafter, Byron and Trelawny embarked for Greece, Mary Shelley’s troubled and troubling step-sister Claire Clairmont departed to become a governess in Russia, and in 1823 Mary and her last ...”

“... of the ‘English spirit’ and would therefore counteract the notion that ‘the minds of young women are becoming unEnglish.’ At Oxford there was little support for English studies, but in 1873 English was included in the examinations for a Pass Degree. After a public campaign during the 1880s, a final Honours School of English Language and ...”

“... from that visit,’ Kenner wrote after McLuhan died. Around the same time, Guy Davenport, a young Rhodes Scholar, was spending the summer tramping around France and Italy with a recently made friend, Christopher Middleton. They had only two books with them, a collection of Donne’s poems and Pound’s Cantos. ‘Neither of us, I think, had much notion ...”