“... a thousand years of history, Michael Heseltine finds space to mention the Venerable Bede, Sir Thomas More, Machiavelli, Newton, Catherine the Great and Adam Smith. But unlike Hugh Gaitskell in his memorable speech to the Labour Party Conference in 1962, he sees a closer link with Europe as the logic of a common European inheritance, not as a break with ...”

“... its operations, its requirement of originality – ‘Originals can arise from genius only,’ as Edward Young alleged – did make a difference to writers, who might well feel frightened into impotence by the appalling demands of genius and sublimity. Reminding us of the Romantic habit of leaving things unfinished, or writing other pieces to avoid having ...”

“... objects to form a face and then drawing from it: the Librarian, for example. Our new sculptors – Edward Allington, David Mach, Tony Cragg – give us the set-up pure and simple. There are 21 articles in this book, one of which samples a further 16 texts. Those by Sven Alfons, R.J.W. Evans, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, and ...”

“... group, the dance of Loïe Fuller as taken up by Mallarmé and others, the theatre as reimagined by Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, the applied arts as practised by Emile Gallé and championed by Roger Marx, the sculpture of Rodin as understood by Rilke, the different cinemas of Chaplin and Vertov, and the photography of the Stieglitz circle. In each ...”

“... What really matters, I suspect, is that Nya is for him something to hold onto, like the novels of Edward Upward, which he also defends for their historical interest, relishing for example in The Spiral Ascent the word and the concept ‘poshocrat’. Like all Bagshaw-type historians, both Kermode and Cobb delight not only in the objects but in the attitudes ...”

“... a bookshop and publishing-house in Vigo Street. Named after that extremely respectable figure Sir Thomas Bodley – scholar, diplomat and founder of the Bodleian – the firm quickly and almost accidentally became synonymous with beautifully-produced, often wickedly illustrated, rather decadent publications. Lane, described by a colleague as being one who ...”

“... possibilities providing the principal subject of plays as diverse as Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (1592), Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, His Fall (1603-5), Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) and John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice (1632). According to Perry, this is in large part because the favourite made conveniently visible a central problem with ...”

“... historical prudence is welcome, because it may well be that hysteria – this ‘Proteus’ as Thomas Sydenham called it in the 17th century – is never anything other than what we say about it, and that hysterics adapt themselves to doctors’ expectations and theories, thereby confirming them. This was the position maintained, notably, by Hippolyte ...”

“... between the monks at Whitby and Durham; by 1670 it was a farming hamlet of 90 people. But when Edward Pease’s Stockton and Darlington Railway was having problems exporting coal from Stockton – the River Tees was too shallow at that point for ships to get through – they chose to extend the line to Middlesbrough, where the Tees was deeper. The ...”

“... of Andromeda, which Marina Warner does not mention. In the most striking of these, by Sir Edward Poynter, the appearance of an eye and tongue created by the vortex movement of the girl’s cloak swirled in the sea wind suggest that the painter and his male viewers are united with Perseus and the sea-monster to form a single voyeur. But Rembrandt’s ...”

“... of the Corbett family, ‘who were murdered During the Massacre of the Christians in Delhi’; to Thomas Collins and no fewer than 23 members of his extended family, ‘all barbarously murdered at Delhi on or about the 11th of May 1857’; to Dr Chimmun Lall, a ‘native Christian and a Worshipper in this Church’, who ‘fell a martyr to his faith on the ...”

“... books, collectors and readers. Every good secondhand bookshop offered guidance for neophytes: A. Edward Newton’s chatty books about his bookish adventures; Holbrook Jackson’s erudite Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton; and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into ...”

“... His subject is an underworld within an underworld: certain followers of the proto-socialist Thomas Spence as they pursued their aims from the period of anti-Jacobin governmental action of the late 1790s, through Spa Fields, Peterloo and Cato Street, to the early years of Chartism. These men were not centre-stage in any of these events, nor were they in ...”

“... workings of her intellectual circle, many of whose members were also her lovers: Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Reo Fortune, Gregory Bateson, Geoffrey Gorer. In retracing the exploits of this scholarly ménage à plusieurs, and in recovering their ideas alongside their passions, Mandler has captured a defining moment in the history of American ...”

“... too by the time of Shakespeare’s death in 1616. Some time around 1614 the Christ Church academic Thomas Goffe wrote for student performance an English version of the Oresteia that is largely composed of near quotations from Hamlet. Its Orestes, the ur-detector of his father’s murder by his mother’s second husband, even carries the bones of the slain ...”