“... Africa weren’t all that different from those of their counterparts in Europe, even a figure like Edward Chambré Hardman, whose father enjoyed photography and whose real passion – for landscape and cityscape – lay beyond the portraits he took in Liverpool in the 1940s and 1950s. (Hardman was still taking portraits for a living after his photograph of the ...”

“... I read Gene Phillips’s Some Like It Wilder (2010) that the actor with the gun is the son of Edward G. Robinson, famous among many other reasons for playing the title role in Little Caesar, although I did, like most people, pick up the reference when Raft asks young Robinson where he got the ‘cheap trick’ of ...”

“... address Stephen Spender, who had known Auden since they were undergraduates, contrasted the young man, Nordic and brilliant, with a ‘second image of Wystan … of course one with which you are all familiar: the famous poet with the face like a map of physical geography, criss-crossed and river-run and creased with lines’. By the early ...”

“... for Roubiliac’s statue of Newton ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’; Newton a young man and unwigged so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the midst of all those reformed prostitutes, thoughtful nuns, sailors home from the main, moribund young poets, drowning ladies, eminent critics splashed by turbulent mountain streams, and fugitive Christian missionaries panting from the chase, here was a painting taking as its subject textures, patterns and things, rather than personal histories and ...”

“... Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.’ And again, in ...”

“... dirty socks, Woodbines – the mood is ominous. The poem ends with a reference to the death of Edward Thomas. Lewis himself was killed in 1944.Sarah Moss’s new novel is set in a lochside cabin park in the Trossachs. The poem behind its title is William Watson’s ‘The Ballad of Semmerwater’, about a city lost beneath a lake. But Lewis’s poem seems ...”

“... to dismiss six boys. They were found behind the tombstones with women of the serving class.’ The young Deedes found a job on the Morning Post. He felt sorry for the unemployed but lived in a Waughish world well removed from such miseries. He and his friends, finding a Mrs Trampleasure in the London phone directory, took turns ringing her to enquire about the ...”

“... state.’ To the reader, it will seem that self-confidence returned pretty fast. Life as a young Scots Greys officer in Westphalia called for the high spirits that go with bruising sports and the release of greased pigs. Tickings-off for Fiennes came from the well-born: from his adjutant, the Duke of Kent (for rifle practice in the bedroom block), and ...”

“... his group, by 1904, followed and reconvened. In New York, they gained new recruits, including the young and brilliantly promising Bellows. The realists saw themselves as a virile avant garde doing battle with a weak, effeminate and derivative American painting. Philadelphia had not provided the material with which to mount an assault, but in New York they ...”

“... James met Rupert Brooke on a visit to Cambridge in June 1909, having been invited there by some young admirers who made him feel, he wrote in a letter, ‘rather like an unnatural intellectual Pasha visiting his Circassian Hareem’. Brooke, in a white shirt and white flannel trousers, took charge of a punting trip on the Cam. ‘Oh yes,’ he said ...”

“... in his lifetime than Keats, with whom he shared a publisher). Clare was discovered in 1819, when Edward Drury, a young Stamford bookseller, wrote to his cousin John Taylor, who was also a bookseller – what we would now call a publisher – and told him that he had discovered a wholly untutored genius: Your hopes of good ...”

“... Edward Snowden​ was born in the summer of 1983. Around this time, the US Defence Department split its computer network into MILNET, an internal military branch, and a public branch, which we now know as the internet. Home computers were becoming pervasive; the Commodore 64 was selling in the millions. One day Snowden’s father brought one home, connected it to the TV set, and the toddler Eddie noticed that his father was now controlling what was happening on the screen ...”

“... because it was the Capital of the Gold Rush. She describes her hero, then bearing the name Edward Muggeridge, arriving there in the autumn of 1855, a youth escaping a tedious provincial future in the family coal and grain business in Kingston-on-Thames. He had left England in 1852, but his three-year journey across America from New York has not been ...”