“... England in disgrace. He was subsequently imprisoned and executed for having quartered the arms of Edward the Confessor with his own (something he was almost certainly entitled to do, so long as the arms carried ‘three labels silver’ to distinguish them from those of the heir to the throne). This was taken to imply a treasonable aspiration to the ...”

“... saying, even as he is left wondering about what these other things are that are not quite being said. Frost may have confessed to cutting up the snake, but he wasn’t about to dissect his own life. In this superb first volume of the Letters (two more are on the way) he doesn’t mention many of the crises that shadowed his early years. There are no ...”

“... or even a street after her: but again, those three syllables defeated too many people. Her nephew Edward Wollstonecraft, an undistinguished and illiberal businessman who emigrated to New South Wales, had a whole district of Sydney named after him, and Australians don’t seem to find it difficult to pronounce: so why do we have so much trouble with his ...”

“... How do we know, for example, that some felt the pain of bereavement more than others? Was Sir Edward Parry the only one of whom it could be said that ‘the First World War effectively destroyed his world,’ or Leonard Woolf the only one qualifying for the remark: ‘The Second World War put paid to his hopes for ...”

“... and aphoristic. ‘Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,’ a friend said to him. ‘You are right,’ Nietzsche answered. ‘Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.’ This wouldn’t have come as news to Marshall McLuhan, Hugh Kenner’s mentor at the University of Toronto in the mid-1940s who in 1967 ...”

“... drowning and swallowing each other on television. Queen Elizabeth I’s coronation speech is said to have been supported by loyal roars from the Tower lions. Were these, Hahn wonders, stage-managed? Like her subjects, the Queen was happy to see animals baited. On one of her progresses she watched a battle royal between 13 bears and a large pack of ...”

“... in the 17th century has created the opportunity to build a new coherence, but it cannot be said that this opportunity has yet been fully taken. These four books perhaps suggest that the time is coming when a synthesis will at last be possible, and that when it is reached, the constitutional and religious ambiguity of the English Reformation may be the ...”

“... home and tried to kill me when they (six people using two cars) put their pistols in my head and I said the (Shahada) Islamic words before the death, but they left me by the will of God. This jolted Muhammad into action and he moved his wife and three children to Damascus, joining what was to become a mass exodus. On a typical day, thousands of families throng ...”

“... the author to claim that he has relied in part on ‘books written by two magnificent Victorians, Edward Walford and Walter Thornbury’: their works, first published in 1875 and 1879 respectively, contain much doubtful anecdotage and often come close to deserving the Athenaeum’s strictures. Exaggeration and egregious self-praise are, alas, also still with ...”

“... Cameron of Lochiel, whose decision, against his better judgment, to come out for Prince Charles Edward Stuart in 1745 won the clans for the Pretender and doomed the ancient culture of the Highlands to extinction. ‘That gentleman, whose rent never exceeded five hundred pounds a year, carried, in 1745, eight hundred of his own people into the rebellion with ...”

“... be a scandal to be unearthed secured the immediate attention of journalists all over the world. Edward Schillebeeckx’s work on Christology was not news until he was summoned to Rome. Then he was at once conscripted as a character in that so often rewritten melodrama – Brecht’s Galileo is the canonical text for our time – The valiant searcher for ...”

“... Edward St Aubyn began writing his Patrick Melrose novels in 1988. He finished At Last, the fifth and supposedly final book in the series, late in 2010. St Aubyn is a terrific prose stylist and, end to end, these 800 or so pages, covering more than 40 years, add up to something incontestably grand, the nearest we have today to the great cycles of upper-class English life published in the decades after the war – Dance to the Music of Time or Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour ...”

“... witnesses on the basis of a carefully prepared set of questions, and recording what each said with meticulous accuracy. For the medieval historian, records thus compiled have a very special quality, allowing uniquely intimate access to individual voices speaking in the past. Very often, moreover, these will be the voices of people who would otherwise ...”

“... her age; they separated within ten months. Three years after that, she took up with the architect Edward William Godwin. They did not marry, but had a daughter and son together, and the expense of their upkeep drove her back to the stage. Her performance as Portia in The Merchant of Venice drew her to the attention of Henry Irving, an emerging actor-manager ...”

“... a home in Kingston. The other related to my work as a historian. I had recently finished a book on Edward Long, slaveowner and author of the celebrated three-volume History of Jamaica, first published in 1774 and never out of print. (Peter Fryer described Long as the ‘father of English racism’ in Staying Power, his classic study of Black people in Britain ...”