“... 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 ...”

“... which agreed that the Queen of Scots, still a baby, would eventually marry Henry VIII’s son, Edward. Had Edward lived, and the union between England and Scotland held, she would have become queen of England, Elizabeth’s ‘sister’. Instead, Scotland turned to France, and Mary was betrothed to the dauphin. Her ...”

“... of offal brought by the barge-load for his beasts’ consumption. His master of the bears was Edward Alleyn, more reputably known as the founder of Dulwich College. The King took a personal interest in the breeding of lions and ‘even designed a nipple for a bottle that one fading cub might suckle from’. Sometimes the lions had to be encouraged with ...”

“... turns on Janet Studdart’s gradual recognition of her love for her sister Laurel’s husband, Edward Tilney. Its crisis occurs when Edward arrives suddenly at Batts Monachorum, the country estate belonging to Janet’s husband’s uncle, who once had a scandalous affair with ...”

“... at the tail end. The second generation were born in the decade 1901-11: Margaret Mead (1901), Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908), Edmund Leach (1910), Louis Dumont and Max Gluckman (1911). They were formed in the age of Hitler and Stalin, and, in the cases of France and Britain, of impending imperial decline. The last generation ...”

“... often are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them – Gurney’s, Edward Thomas’s, Owen’s – rise from the shared world of trench-mud with astonishing freshness. And Gurney, at least, would have approved Taylor’s chosen prelude, a poem by that patron of all things common, Walt Whitman, whose work he appears to have ...”

“... His father, a publisher and bookseller, was a dogmatic religious enthusiast, and as a young man in the 1850s Seeley experienced the crisis of belief that afflicted so many of his contemporaries. In the aftermath of his breakdown he rejected his father’s ideas and embraced the theology of the Broad Church movement. This was the ...”

“... least one of his evenings would be recorded. He said he had kept a diary himself for a while when young, but it seemed to be heavy in pensées and complaint. It was cool on George’s terrace, four storeys up, looking out over Trastevere. He was quick to refill our drinks. I smoked a cigar. Candace was pretty in her yellow dress. Gore talked, imitated, made ...”

“... John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger ushered in a theatrical revolution. Launching both the Angry Young Man and kitchen-sink drama, the play is held to have had a devastating and irreversible impact on a postwar theatre scene dominated by winsome drawing-room comedies and witless country-house whodunnits. At the time, the play and its message were anatomised ...”

“... for many generations. They were part of the Grosvenor (later Westminster) estate left by the young heiress Mary Davies in the 17th century, together with the Mayfair lands which were the first to be exploited. The story of poor addled Mary as the wellhead of wealth scarcely to be imagined is part of legend. To the admirable Thomas Cubitt goes the major ...”

“... genteel domesticity could come from a Mike Leigh script. Take his description of tea with Edward and ‘Medea’: She was about to pour the tea. Instead, she hurled the full teapot across the room, in the direction of Edward’s head; it was quite a good, very powerful shot, but it just missed him, shattering ...”