“... paranoia about cancellable offences everyone might already be committing without realising it. Edward Said once wrote that Conrad was incapable of seeing beyond imperialism, since it monopolised the entire system of representation, but that he could express self-consciousness as an outsider. No degree of estrangement, however, was sufficient to save Conrad ...”

“... family, the Ardens, were strongly Catholic, and that the head of the Warwickshire branch, Edward Arden, was first implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth I, then tried and executed. As a result, official persecution of Catholics in the area was renewed. Hughes notes that Shakespeare’s father, John, was a recusant, and he also accepts as ...”

“... but this does not justify giving him a position more crucial than that occupied, for example, by Thomas Hobbes. Among the inclusions and exclusions in this volume, there is no particularly clear principle, but some are more questionable than others. One of the more surprising inclusions is Andrew Marvell. To classify him as one who suffered ‘the experience ...”

“... of an élite, material and economic, ideological and cultural, educational and moral’. Like Edward Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, which it resembles (despite major differences in assumptions and methods) in its combination of analytical and imaginative power and in its vigorous prose, not to mention its length, it is a major ...”

“... he attended the first performance of Nadeshda, a romantic opera in four acts by Arthur Goring Thomas: it appears that this Nadeshda is regarded by her neighbours as somewhat fanciful, but gifted with an excellent disposition and considerable personal attractiveness. She presently appears, laden with flowers. Ostap intimates that he has something ...”

“... grist to Constant’s radical mill, and he gleefully took on Bottom Dogs by the American writer Edward Dahlberg: a book so shocking that it was published in a limited edition of 500 copies with gilt tops at 15 shillings – double the normal price of novels. But when Arnold Bennett, then at the height of his fame as a critic, wrote that ‘it took you by ...”

“... photographs, objects and clothing relating to pregnancy from the 15th century to the present, Edward Burne-Jones’s Annunciation (1876-79) shows the Virgin receiving news of her pregnancy from the Angel Gabriel. This (the First Joyful Mystery) preoccupied me from the age of nine or ten. I may not have got my period, I may have been years from letting any ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... satellites, which appear as faint streaks across his dark prints. (As in the first line of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, ‘a screaming comes across the sky,’ only here the screaming is silent.) Apart from intelligence-gathering in the present, the satellites are also space debris of the future, even eventual artefacts of an extinct ...”

“... habits of early 20th-century London. The paper’s first lead review was of More Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, done by Augustine Birrell, a barrister, a Liberal MP, and the author of a volume of essays entitled Obiter Dicta. The first poem was by Harold Begbie. It was an anthem for Empire, and May succinctly describes it as ‘rather an absurd ...”

“... the jury’s verdict, on both sides of the Atlantic, from that day to this was the preparedness of Edward Bushel and his fellow jurors in 1670 to go to jail rather than obey the judge and convict the Quakers Penn and Mead of creating a tumultuous assembly by preaching in Gracechurch Street. Kadri recounts the extraordinary refusal of a disinterested jury of ...”

“... in Redland, in a house now part of the university. In his teens, Sidgwick went to Rugby. Although Thomas Arnold had died in 1841, the school retained the impress of his high-minded and reforming personality, and Sidgwick’s mother overcame her doubts about English boarding schools – though she took up residence in a house opposite the school, which ...”

“... countryside, the English sense of humour, the English love of fair play.’ William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Edward Elgar were brought forth to prove that the roots of British character lay deep in the countryside, and were still healthy despite the enervating effects of urban life. Yet to anyone who took the trouble ...”

“... reading to the merely knowable. Auden’s nursery library was also stocked with Beatrix Potter, Edward Lear and Harry Graham. And George had a passion for Norse legends, believing as he did that the Audens could themselves be traced back to the land of Thor: ‘In my father’s library, scientific books stood side by side with works of poetry and ...”

“... in 1918. Of Strachey’s chosen targets, Cardinal Manning was a self-deceiving hypocrite, Dr Thomas Arnold the epitome of earnest Victorianism, who modelled his pedagogic vision on Jehovah’s relations with the Israelites, Florence Nightingale a bedridden female tyrant who drove her devoted male acolytes to early death, and General Gordon an imperial ...”