“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that reef To which, Lucretius says, all things must tend, Exhausted by the flow of time? We end, Said Pushkin, to make way for a fresh start By others: let the new-born give us heart. ‘They crowd us from the world,’ he wrote, but not As one who, scared of losing what he’s got, Has really nothing very much to say Beyond timor mortis conturbat me – He ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his first ship – for in 1916 the decision was finally taken by the Standard’s new owner, Sir Edward Hulton, to end its 60-year career as a morning paper. Griffiths is not entirely convincing as to how and why this collapse came about: the paper had been making a profit at least until 1911 and other newspapers found their fortunes underpinned rather than ...”

“... the book that made Mack Smith famous in Italy. When Cavour and Garibaldi appeared, A.J.P. Taylor said of it, ‘With brilliant, though well-founded perversity, Mr Mack Smith turns things upside down,’ and that was certainly part of the reason for its impact. The traditional view of the main actors in the drama of the Italian unification movement had been ...”

“... men who struggled most with life in the dolls’ house. Ridley’s biography of George’s father, Edward VII, showed how as prince of Wales he sank into an analgesic round of gargantuan meals, card playing, shooting and ponderous intercourse with society ladies. Unwilling to become the signing automaton of constitutional theory after his accession, ...”

“... they fasten on us, supplanting the previous reality much more effectively, it has to be said, than Calvino’s much lengthier, only half-tantalising truncated novellas in If on a winter’s night a traveller. In the Calvino, the deliberate air of pastiche alerts his reader’s wariness and, since his subject is the reading experience itself, Calvino ...”

“... In a short story called ‘The Value of Money’ (1964), we are told that the childhood of Edward Gellert ‘was separated sharply from his adolescence by his mother’s death, which occurred when he was ten.’ In Maxwell’s novel The Folded Leaf (1945), the teenager Lymie Peters has already lost his mother. The narrator of So Long, See You Tomorrow ...”

“... When​ faced by admirers, Edward Lear was inclined to portray himself as a puzzle, or a trap: ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’     Who has written such volumes of stuff! Some think him ill-tempered and queer,     But a few think him pleasant enough.The first observation was originally made by somebody who did not know Mr Lear ...”

“... of Tuscany, and Count Eustace of Boulogne, who had some right to think that he might have been Edward the Confessor’s heir; there is much, much more of this electrifying stuff. To compare any book with The Making of the Middle Ages is to be about as flattering as is possible. Southern is the acknowledged prince of English-speaking medievalists. Yet it is ...”

“... the Kaiser would die of throat cancer. He also claimed the Liberal Government had killed King Edward VII. David Gilmour, who does the best he can to defend Kipling against his detractors, insists that some of this was not intended ‘personally’, but it is hard to see how that could be. In fact Kipling comes over as a deeply unsympathetic character in ...”

“... be known by succeeding generations as a ‘secular saint’, not a bad description for a man who said that ‘the theatre is really a religion or a way of life,’ even if, as Richardson says, ‘he always had the cement and truck dust on his hands – that’s why the hod-carriers would follow him to the top of the scaffolding.’ The danger with the ...”