“... pictured on the jacket of this book, on which the photograph powerfully, inevitably, alludes to Edward Hopper. Whatever is going to happen around here is likely to be depressing: possibly just a marital argument, more seriously a fire in a neighbour’s house or the death of a child. Such happiness as can be expected must be looked for on fishing trips, and ...”

“... of Scotland’s rulers, led an army of unusual size and quality into northern England. The young Henry VIII had embarked on a military expedition in northern France, and Scotland responded to French calls for aid by invading England. James IV’s army was equipped with an impressive number of modern cannon cast in bronze and was accompanied by ...”

“... Adam Smith was paid £8000, or the better part of a million pounds in today’s money, to take the young Duke of Buccleuch to France and Geneva for three years. Such independence permitted some Scots (such as Lords Monboddo and Buchan) to adopt an aristocratic attitude to their writing, and speak airily of wishing only to be ‘useful’. Others grumbled in ...”

“... to have prepared them. After the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed in 1921, the unionist patriarch Edward Carson wrote: ‘I was only a puppet, and so was Ulster, and so was Ireland, in the political game that was to get the Conservative Party into power.’Gove went straight from his exchange with Paisley to meet Šefčovič. They issued a joint statement ...”

“... was barred to him. He often complained of the Trinity culture, and had mixed feelings about Edward Dowden, TCD’s celebrated professor of English, a friend of his father’s whom he had known well in his youth; Dowden was too lukewarm, too English, as he himself might have become had he gone to the College. Later there was a time when Yeats ...”

“... The coup​ is almost funny, if you squint. The year was 1954, and the CIA, still young and enthusiastic, had decided to overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala. Washington was convinced that the tiny republic was a threat, a reflection of growing anti-communist paranoia, and – in particular – of the ministrations of Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, who was on the payroll of United Fruit, one of the US’s largest corporations ...”

“... annexe at Christchurch Priory in Dorset nonetheless represents Marston as a bearded and beruffed young man sitting with a balder companion in front of two tankards of ale. Sadly, today’s visual shorthand for ‘morally intense Jacobean playwright who took holy orders’, even in the church where he prayed for a quarter of a century, is just ‘bloke in pub ...”

“... Robert Frost to W.H. Auden, from Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or phrases such as ‘dim lands of peace’ – locutions that abound in de la Mare – still found that on occasion volumes such as Peacock Pie ...”

“... the dance. There was a Princess Margaret Set, just as the Prince Regent had the Carlton House Set, Edward VII had the Marlborough House Set, and Edward VIII had the Fort Belvedere Set: three playboys, only one playgirl. It is 15 years since she died, and memories of her are not as sharp as they were. Which makes Craig ...”

“... crisis in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, especially when the Carolingian heir was too young to lead an army, some of these magnates (Ralph of Burgundy, Hugh Capet’s great-uncle Odo and his grandfather Robert I) were elected king. When the direct line of Carolingians came to an end with the death of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... abruptly burst out laughing, suddenly take offence, spontaneously weep or are precipitately drunk. Edward Kuznetsov’s Russian Novel, providing as it does a sort of running commentary on Russian-ness, often throws light on that kind of puzzlement – which does not mean that it is a not a complicated and often perplexing book. At one level it is easy ...”

“... novelists rested comfortably in the routines that had brought them success in the past, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-73) was always committed to experimentation. He was his own pitiless taskmaster, working for money as strenuously as a starveling, and received £30,000 from Routledge for a 15-year option on his novels. He wrote successful silver-fork ...”

“... at least they had no children) suggesting a scheme for getting more of these eugenically sound young women into the breeding stock: ‘I heartily wish it were possible,’ he wrote, ‘to institute a dower fund as an equivalent to Fellowships. It is a monstrous shame to use any of these gifted girls for hack work, such as breadwinning. It is as bad as ...”

“... Moroccan, and now especially Algerian thinkers and commentators to address such topics head on. Edward Said argues that the Palestinian Authority shows signs of following exactly the same authoritarian route. At one time, from the late Fifties until the wars that began in the mid-Seventies, Beirut offered a unique regional arena of debate, in contrast to ...”