“... could be hanged as a British traitor for war crimes committed in Germany. William Joyce and James Joyce had their British passports in common. At least James’s literary nationality has never been in doubt, though this is scarcely true of his friend and compatriot Samuel Beckett. It would be interesting to know how ...”

“... of the less well known of these, such as Anthony Hamilton, an Anglo-Irish Jacobite who followed James II to France and there, writing in French, inaugurated the tradition of elegant mockery of the excesses of The Arabian Nights that opened the way for the rationalist arabesques of Voltaire and others. Warner might have included many more. ...”

“... of the 19th century could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In Sense and Sensibility Edward Ferrars, who has chosen to do nothing for a living and regrets it, reels off four possibilities:I always preferred the church, as I still do. But that was not smart enough for my family. They recommended the army. That was a great deal too smart for ...”

“... place in church because it put her next to someone with ‘a strong breath’. The chaplain to James I’s wife, Queen Anne, held that of ‘all the noisome scents, there is none so rammish and so intolerable as that which proceeds from man’s body … I will not speak of his filth issuing from his eares, his eyes, nostrils, mouth, navel, and the uncleane ...”

“... Lincolnshire clergyman, a 19-year-old Harrovian and a Chamonix guide. They were the casualties of Edward Whymper’s successful assault on the Matterhorn in 1865, lost during the descent; a tragedy supposedly honoured by nature with an enormous fog-bow, incorporating two crosses. Whymper survived with two Swiss guides, father and son. The English chaplain of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In February​ 1840, Edward FitzGerald came home to find Alfred Tennyson installed on the sofa, grimy and stinking of tobacco. He was in a bad way, argumentative and restless; his griping was so incessant that FitzGerald asked him to call ‘a truce’ on his complaints. As was his habit, Tennyson stayed for a few days, and then disappeared, perhaps going back to Epping Forest, where his brother Septimus was in an asylum, or to his family’s new house in Tunbridge Wells, or up to Lincolnshire and his cottage in Mablethorpe, where he could wander the long, empty beaches and the post arrived no more than once a week ...”

“... to the decline of Parliament’s effective supremacy. A key moment came in the early 1970s, with Edward Heath’s effort to gain approval for Britain’s entry into the EEC through normal parliamentary channels. Labour didn’t only challenge the terms of Heath’s deal: its election manifesto insisted that it was up to the people ‘through the ballot ...”

“... inns, unlike their rich metropolitan colleagues; he could certainly deploy an obscure statute of Edward I in an argument about local pleadings. But what is most remarkable is his sophisticated historical analysis of the law and legal change, going far beyond the Norman Yoke theories of Levellers and Winstanley invoked in the introduction. Warr indeed derides ...”

“... instead mildly successful at W.H. Smith and the Times Bookshop. The case was altered only by James Douglas, the editor (also in a crusader’s spirit) of the Sunday Express. Douglas decided, a month later, to feature the book and its photogenic author, in her ‘severe’ smoking-jacket, as evidence of ‘the plague stalking shamelessly through public ...”

“... turn into a prodigal son and ‘walk the Hospitals, Enter at the Temple, or mount Guard at St James’. In later letters surrealism is replaced by the quieter nonsense she patiently wrote to her brothers’ children (her dislike was general, not particular) in backwards spelling or in a cousin of the B language (‘mo up in the Poach’). She emerges as a ...”

“... call this a metathesis: ‘A raven is like a writing desk because it bodes ill for owed bills’ (James Michie). Barthes goes on to say: ‘Everything is always the same,’ says the true palindrome; whether you take things in one direction or the other, the truth remains. ‘Everything can assume an opposite meaning,’ says Arcimboldo’s ...”

“... History of Ancient Art by Winckelmann in 1764 to the appearance of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans in 1941, his focus is on the arts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that is, on high modernism. His range of interests is impressive: Rancière delves into the poetry of Whitman, the acrobatic performances of the Hanlon-Lees ...”

“... easily surpasses in size (and in price) the principal older collections edited by F.C. Mather and Edward Royle, although for the hardy there remains a less easily available set put together by Dorothy Thompson, the doyenne of Chartist studies. Claeys is a past master of the art of compilation, having already produced similar collections of the writings of ...”

“... impulse’ and ‘moral insanity’ had allowed the would-be assassin of Queen Victoria, Edward Oxford, to escape the gallows three years previously. The doctors, for their part, criticised the M’Naghten Rules for failing to take any account of the unconscious. What, they asked, was the law to do with murderers who were rational, conscious of ...”