“... it involves – undergirds the tremendously resonant concept of ‘Orientalism’ as laid out by Edward Said in his 1978 book of that title. As Said presents it, Orientalism is a Western discourse that essentialises the Arab world in derogatory terms (as effeminate, decadent, timeless and so on), and is intimately bound up with the imposition of imperial ...”

“... book could be expected to have the guile to become prime minister. What, then, is there left for Edward Pearce to say? His biography is a handsome and informative study, benefiting from the co-operation of its subject, notably by means of unique access to the diary which Healey kept from the age of 16. Evidently a spare and terse record, this has provided ...”

“... Biography, an expansion of Franz Schulze’s definitive 1985 study, co-authored with the architect Edward Windhorst, includes new interviews with Marx. ‘I was hungover most of the time,’ she said of their early years. ‘Mies was fascinated by the fact that I stopped as suddenly as I did, but it didn’t affect the quantity of his intake.’ Schulze and ...”

“... savings to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank claret with him at teatime as they sang sea shanties together in Ransome’s mother’s kitchen. And Ransome took to most people; he was not choosy. In fact, he was inclined to instant and lasting hero ...”

“... Bends, which I came across when I was researching an engraving after the Welsh artist and writer Edward Pugh, made some twenty-odd years before Telford began his work. According to Telford, the Irish politicians summoned to Westminster several times a year ‘dreaded’ the part of the journey that lay through North Wales. The stretch of the old road about ...”

“... country house with formal gardens, lakes and an extensive deer park. Lord Digby (1809-89) was Sir Edward St Vincent Digby, the earl’s son-in-law. Walton, the gamekeeper, was William Walton; according to the 1861 census, he was born around 1800 in Somerton, Somerset. Mansel-Pleydell informs us that Walton is ‘still living’, a detail perhaps included for ...”

“... who was their honorary president. Long after his ill-fated premiership, well-wishers from Edward VII downwards wanted him to come back and could not stop wondering what he would do next. In H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, one of the first questions the sceptical journalist asks the Time Traveller is: ‘These chaps here say you have been travelling ...”

“... father had survived the camps, but on his return to Poland had taken up life with a woman whom the young Roman instantly and inevitably rejected as his mother’s usurper. All this forms a well-known recipe for adolescent hooliganism. Polanski, however, who would have made a memorable little hoodlum in those years of black market and violence, surmounted his ...”

“... Over the past year evidence has been emerging that the Japanese kidnapped more than 200,000 young women into sex slavery during their occupation of East Asia. Those so enslaved were termed ‘comfort women’, about 80 per cent of whom were Korean. Some were as young as 12, hauled out of their schools, often under a quota system, and carted off to army barracks and outposts all the way from Manchuria to the South Pacific ...”

“... And her daughter’s really suffered. It just shows, someone can do something terrible at a very young age and then change completely, d’you not think? Yes, I say, unsure, out of my depth, yes I suppose they can. A tall, watchful, intense man with coal black hair streaked with silver, he seems eaten up by something, somehow closed in and elsewhere, yet ...”

“... Iran Modern (2018), Pahlavi writes that the idea occurred to her in the late 1960s, when a young woman painter complained there was nowhere in Tehran where artworks could be permanently displayed. Pahlavi asked her cousin, the architect Kamran Diba, to come up with a design. He planned the building around a central atrium, which spirals below ground ...”

“... as wilful – on the contrary, the misbehavers had their counterparts in the horde of priggish young who set about eroding the turpitude of wicked adults, as in the magazine story of 1827 called ‘The Pious Girl and her Swearing Father’: judging by her clinging attitude (she is illustrated with both arms clasped around his neck), he had plenty to swear ...”

“... theology he inherited, while resolutely demolishing the bricks and mortar beneath. Edward Schillebeeckx, one of the Council’s most eminent theologians, was summoned to Rome to be cross-examined no less than three times in the first year of the new papacy. Hans Küng, Vatican 2’s other great luminary, had his teaching licence revoked. ‘Be ...”

“... And for this they collected and accounted for small sums given ‘of devotion’. The store of the Young Men (all bachelors of communicant age) raised larger sums from parties (church ales) to keep the lights burning before the patronal image of St George. Although ‘devotion’ is a somewhat inaccessible substance – we cannot weigh or measure the piety of ...”

“... a dubious decorum. What was their relationship like? In a telling family memoir from 1867, James Edward Austen-Leigh, Austen’s nephew, described it thus: Their sisterly affection for each other could scarcely be exceeded. Perhaps it began on Jane’s side with a feeling of deference natural to a loving child towards a kind elder sister. Something of this ...”