“... night Nathaniel Hawthorne and I sat together at dinner and talked for an hour, although Hawthorne said nothing.’ His admirers included some of the nation’s greatest men: in 1860, thanking a friend for a gift of Halleck’s poems, Abraham Lincoln wrote: ‘Many a month has passed since I have met with anything more admirable than his beautiful ...”

“... 113 years, three months and 11 days.’ Thus the sleeper awakes, and begins – in the words of Edward Bellamy’s title – ‘looking backward’. Julian West had fallen asleep in the Boston of 1887, a city riven with poverty and industrial strife. He was now in a new Boston of peace and harmony, which was ticking away like well-oiled clockwork. It is ...”

“... confirming descent’ stirs an extra beauty from the darkness of the Indian, but it might be said of any doctor. Certainly, no particular doctor is made to exist in our mind’s eye, which is strange, for presumably an actual doctor exists very powerfully in Robin’s memory. The passage is lovely, with its smooth dormition, but it does not belong to ...”

“... in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were scuppered after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 – when a young female aide drowned in a car he drove off a bridge. However, when it was revealed that the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee for 1972, Senator Thomas ...”

“... gang, headed by a rascally rector, who murdered a Leicestershire magnate and robbed one of Edward I’s trailbaston judges, before going on to commit numerous robberies in Lincolnshire. The gang were brothers, well-connected enough to buy pardons from the Crown, or to atone by serving in the King’s Army, but fatally drawn to highway robbery. The ...”

“... up the poor’ into handy subcategories. People who live on council estates aren’t all alike: as Edward, Tom’s unscrupulous editor, puts it, there are the ‘Deserving Poor’, hard-working, decent families with traditional working-class values, and there are ‘Bad Apples’, immigrants, welfare state parasites, ‘sexual degenerates’. The Enrights have ...”

“... life which, even as described in his own anthology, seems relatively unappealing. Whatever may be said in favour of the country house as a mode of government, way of life, shrine of culture or architectural artifact, there is clearly much to be said against it too, in part because so many country-house owners seem to have ...”

“... Eleven of Edward Moulton-Barrett’s dozen children survived to adulthood; and eight were left behind when the eldest escaped to Italy with Robert Browning in 1846 (two sons, including the father’s namesake, had died six years earlier). Moulton-Barrett did not attempt to hoard girl-children only, although the legend surrounding his daughter’s elopement has sometimes suggested that ...”

“... for the half-hour they were delayed by the blockade. GET OFF THE BUS! JOIN US, another banner said, and the official-looking signs from the 9 December blockade were put up at either end of the Facebook bus: WARNING: INCOME GAP AHEAD the one at the front said. STOP DISPLACEMENT NOW, read the one at the back. One ...”

“... Public inquiries​ are an ancient institution. Edward I’s Statute de Officio Coronatoris of 1276, which codified already longstanding law, obliged coroners to ‘go to the place where any be slain or suddenly dead’ to investigate. But coroners’ inquiries rarely deal with matters of general public concern. The idea of holding an inquiry in response to a public scandal is comparatively recent ...”

“... Is Exporting Fear, Globalising Risk and Making Us All Less Secure (Chicago, £19), Lynn Klotz and Edward Sylvester make a compelling case for a radical and immediate change in America’s biosecurity policy. Since 9/11, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the US government has spent $50 billion on its biodefence programme: Klotz ...”

“... to welcome a former Tiananmen activist blacklisted by Beijing, even if I now had a US passport: I said he had better check with the border control agency. He got back to me a few days later, having discovered what I knew already. This year, in an effort to make the event worthy of its title – ‘Value Renewal and Pathfinding for China’s Pro-Democracy ...”

“... There is no inner tension, no feeling incommunicable in any other way, as there is in Eliot or Edward Thomas, or even in such an apparently frivolous squib as Betjeman’s ‘ Death in Leamington’. Housman was unexpectedly benevolent about Blunden’s poetry and helped to get him an award from the Royal Literary Fund: but he was a little dry about it in ...”

“... The new material also provides at least one curious story. It concerns Jane Williams, whose lover Edward drowned with Shelley, and who became the emotional centre of Mary’s life for some time after. (Although she took Williams’s name, she was not in fact married to him but had a husband in the Army in India from whom ...”

“... life at that time than in a desire to say anything about the war. The book tells the story of Edward Haggard, a young hospital doctor, training to be a surgeon, who falls in love with the wife of the hospital’s senior pathologist. There are many excellent characters (Cushing, for example, the flinty senior surgeon who is given to whistling arias from ...”