“... 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 ...”

“... from his publisher with a note that read: ‘Please don’t imagine that America is full of rich young men of that kind!’ Thayer wasn’t modest, but he was discreet, especially compared to the most prominent New York salonnier of the 1920s, Carl Van Vechten, who shamelessly made sure his name was associated with those he helped. Thayer had some literary ...”

“... monarchs to do it, if they found men of experience to assist them.A legend holding that Edward III hired an alchemist to help fund a crusade contained a grain of truth: the king did think alchemy might alleviate his economic problems, one of which was a currency flooded with counterfeits. In the early 1340s, John of Walden was paid a considerable ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.’ The last of the novel’s quotations is from Edward Lear, who knew about writing and depression. There was an ink stain on the side of her face. She touched at it, feeling the blackness entering inside her. There was a Young . . . – ...”

“... it work. Frost spent a long time telling other people that there was more to come from him. ‘A young man knows more about himself than he is able to prove to anyone,’ he observed, and in the early letters he is repeatedly undertaking a future for himself. ‘Even in my failures I find all the promise I require to justify the astonishing magnitude of my ...”

“... eccentric but deeply experienced traveller. Also in the English party was the embassy chaplain, a young man called Edward Terry. Years later, Terry published a memoir of his Indian travels, and this obscure volume – A Voyage to East India (1655) – contains almost the only information we have about Coryate’s last ...”

“... a hundred she would puff out her lips and make a raspberry noise.’ Rubinstein’s husband Edward Titus, a great bibliophile and an expert on Baudelaire, very sensibly remained in Paris as his wife began her assault on New York. He had, she said later, ‘a nose for art, a nose for property’. However, ‘the cost of running him’, as Lindy Woodhead ...”

“... whether it really existed. The Movement (a rather localised, mostly Oxford affair) and the Angry Young Men (more London, more of the theatre) were certainly the inventions of journalists, but they took on a kind of reality when the public was induced to view the young men in terms of those inventions, and also when the ...”

“... case some readers may not have heard of him. He was born in 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces. Margot Tennant, who married Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, was his paternal aunt. Tennant spent ...”

“... Can you always count on a bastard for a fancy prose style? It is hard to imagine the fiction of Edward St Aubyn stripped of the cool silver of its style. I am not accusing St Aubyn of being a bastard; I mean that he writes very well about bastards, and that both their contempt for the world and St Aubyn’s contempt for them find their best expression in a certain kind of intelligent, frozen stylishness ...”

“... missing from courtship and from marriage. This is a position particularly associated with Edward Shorter, whose Making of the Modern Family defends the view that it was capitalism and the rise of industry 150 years after the time described by Quaife which introduced these things into the emotional lives of the mass of the population. No one can read ...”

“... distinguished poems here by Jill Bowers, Jack Barrack and (a practised hand, which shows) Charles Edward Eaton; from William Radice (a beautifully imagined variation on Virgil), and Mark Beeson (a similarly accomplished essay in the Dantesque); from Pauline Rainford, Monica Ditmas, Anne Stevenson (two) and John Whitworth; from Aidan Carl Mathews (another ...”

“... quality, have treated the sculptures as if they were landscapes or people in the street. Two young Englishmen, Stephen Haweis and Henry Coles, who photographed many of them in the early 1900s, preferred to take their pictures at sunset. Some of the images they made, in which detail is buried in deep shadow, are as soft and dark as heavily inked ...”