“... gone down in real terms and ‘it’s hard to corrupt anyone now on £70.’ Indeed the risk for young writers is that they may love the job too much. ‘Waking to the flop of the jiffybag on the mat, he knows it as the sound of the beginning of a good day’; the piece he does will be published quite quickly, while the book he neglects in order to meet the ...”

“... guide his flock and give direction to his life. The problems of the flock are various: Shirley, a young woman whose gay husband has run off with another man, is lonely, and her son is more deeply damaged still by his father’s desertion. Norah, a retired nurse, is unhappily married to a barrister who grieves petulantly for the domestic efficiency and ...”

“... effects: what of the content and manner that produced them? It is, obviously (how well we now know young Tom!), all about fashion and style, and it purports to be an account of how the fashion for modern architecture was foisted on America by foreigners. In other words, it continues a traditional Isolationist/Conspiracy-theory attitude roughed out around the ...”

“... a sleepless week in a haunted house, without being acutely frightened – merely very tired.’ Edward Leeves’s journal existed as a kind of memorial to his love for a Lifeguardsman who died of cholera at Chelsea Barracks in 1849. ‘Recollections! I am heartsick of everything, & long only for that peace which is nowhere but in the grave.’ The very ...”

“... Calverley’s Schoolmaster Abroad with his Son, which I have never seen in any anthology for the young, would have been far more suitable, though the Dragon editors, schoolmasters themselves, might have thought it subversive. O what harper could worthily harp it, Mine Edward! This wide stretching wold (Look out wold) with ...”

“... 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 ...”