“... from the one Hourani had learnt at Oxford’, he might have explored the association further. Edward Said’s memoir, Out of Place, sheds more light on the powerful mind and personality of Malik: ebullient, erudite and eloquent, he seems to have acted as a kind of tutor-cum-father-figure at one stage of Said’s career. A friend of both Kennedy and ...”

“... hands of a Popish Malignant Company.’ At Putney in the winter of 1647, Cromwell had repudiated Thomas Harrison’s demand that the king be put on trial. But whatever its motivation – and there is no need to fasten on any single motive – the eventual execution enabled Cromwell and Ireton to stamp out the movement for democracy in the army and to ...”

“... Bruno Schulz was not Dante. Nor was he another Kafka (a writer whom he greatly admired). No Thomas Aquinas stood behind Schulz’s infernos and glimpses of paradise; nor is there in his work any notion of an inaccessible Law of the kind Kafka invoked with unappeasable irony. What Schulz did share with Kafka was a Father Problem. His father, like ...”

“... novel and fifth book; her first books had been biographies, of her father’s famous family and of Edward Burne-Jones. She was 62 when she won the Booker, a widow and the mother of three grown-up children, and although no longer in straits as desperate as those she had drawn on for the novel, she was accustomed to making do on very little. She lived on the ...”

“... who, in 1870, already suspected that their new town might fare better if named Upton Royal. Thomas Hardy is hoisted aboard and driven past Weymouth to the Isle of Portland, a rocky place where Marie Stopes was once to be found retired among stoneworkers still accustomed to testing the fertility of potential brides before finally consenting to marry ...”

“... killing of King Richard II’. Fourth, at Meyrick’s trial on 5 March, the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, asserted that ‘the story of Henry IV being set forth in a play, and in that play there being set forth the killing of the King upon the stage’, Meyrick and his fellows had had ‘the play of Henry IV’ performed. Finally, a Government ...”

“... begun to feel like a weekly basis. More striking still, perhaps, are the new forms of support act. Edward Mendelson describes his critical study of Mrs Dalloway as a guide to the novel’s ‘inner life’. Mark Hussey’s is subtitled ‘Biography of a Novel’. What next for the literary masterpiece, one wonders. Birthday cards? A retirement gong?Daunted by ...”

“... life of That Most Excellent Citizen and Uncorrupted Member of Parliament, as his first biographer Edward Thompson described him in 1776, the year of James Barry’s engraving. Andrew Marvell, whose father was an Anglican clergyman, was born in the East Riding of Yorkshire in 1621, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1633 at the age of 12. He left ...”

“... the great champion of New York, in the old cemetery of Trinity Church near the WTC. While Thomas Jefferson waxed pastoral about an agrarian America, Hamilton insisted on the cosmopolitanism of the city as the wellspring of the nation. To see his grave buried again was difficult, but the rubble will be removed. So come delight in the city again, swap ...”

“... want to keep private. The encomia at his memoir’s start evoke a picture of him as the Edward Snowden of his day: ‘No investigative journalist, before or since, has managed to reveal quite so many things that the [British] government wanted kept secret,’ writes Michael Goodman of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. And yet ...”

“... consulting services primarily to governments, including military and intelligence agencies. Edward Snowden, who in 2013 leaked a trove of signals intelligence data and revealed US domestic and foreign mass surveillance programmes, was a Booz Allen consultant at the NSA and before that an agent at the CIA. Booz Allen also helped the UAE set up its ...”

“... rationale for making the school syllabus more contemporary. ‘It is surely far more important,’ Edward Short, Labour’s Minister of Education, told the Association of Education Committees in 1968, ‘for young people to know the facts about Vietnam than it is to know all the details of the Wars of the Roses.’ These modernising tendencies were very much ...”

“... forenoone knell of the great bell’. Such details help to anchor the lyrics empirically and, as Thomas Hardy endlessly shows, such random, discrete facts are essential to our need to imagine experience. Annotating Shakespeare’s meditation in sonnet 68 on ageing and the means used to disguise it, Duncan-Jones notes that wigs and false hair must often have ...”

“... was very different, although economic expertise was no panacea for success: both Harold Wilson and Edward Heath were far more aware of the economic problems of their time than Eden was of those in his. Yet neither was able to do much to solve them. Eden’s life spanned the years between the heyday of Britain’s imperial grandeur and her decline, remarkably ...”

“... act become a site of such debilitating fear and shame? Why, in the course of the 18th century, as Thomas Laqueur asks in this rich and lively history, did a practice tolerated by the ancients and largely ignored by Judeo-Christian moralists, come to be seen as the height of erotic depravity? Laqueur, who teaches at Berkeley, is the author of Making Sex: Body ...”