“... Poetry Center in order to establish a reading series (a recent phenomenon popularised by Dylan Thomas) and archive. Auden stayed with Ruth Witt-Diamant, the Poetry Center’s founding director, and, in return for his considerable largesse, asked only that he be delivered to gay bars where he might meet young Jewish American males with blond hair. Thom Gunn ...”

“... him, with the ‘Essay on Exoticism’ as its main focus, in relation to the arguments of Edward Said and others. In passing, it situates Segalen also in relation to the reform movement we’ve seen take hold in the writing of ethnography, whereby ethnographers have been freed to write themselves into the accounts of their fieldwork and abandon the ...”

“... of the LRB feel liberated by learning the details of female circumcision? In the same decade, Edward Sapir, analysing many North American languages, advanced the doctrine that a language reflects the way that its speakers understand the world – a way that may be incomprehensible without the language. Kant’s a prioris, structures of the human ...”

“... this in Milton’s day. The last two men burned for heresy in England, Bartholomew Legate and Edward Whiteman in 1612, were antitrinitarians. In the mid-1650s, when Milton was working on De Doctrina Christiana, his contemporary John Biddle was imprisoned and interrogated by a parliamentary committee for publishing antitrinitarian views; Cromwell had ...”

“... death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since ...”

“... that Lois herself had been a high-school supporter of the Socialist Party of America under Norman Thomas and perhaps, at university, an admirer of the young militants whose star rose in the party during the early 1930s. Lois sends a funny letter to her family in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that she was sorry I was a ...”

“... existence on the plateau Selous was prepared to deny. Singing in that language, the extraordinary Thomas Maphumo has established a world-wide reputation with a musical style that melds a traditional Shona instrument, the mbira, and its bubbling rhythm with influences from rock, soul and reggae – and with political protest. Zimbabwe has horrendous economic ...”

“... sent off to be thoroughly Englished at Uppingham School, then under the headship of the magnetic Edward Thring. Hornung loved everything about the school – the headmaster, the classics, the ethos of muscular Christianity and above all the cricket, although he was not much good at games, being tiny, near blind behind his pebble glasses and afflicted with ...”

“... by the American writers David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown – or, in the terminology of Edward O. Wilson, in a ‘consilience’, a convergence of intellectual disciplines, humanities with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to self-will. First defined in the 15th century by Leonardo Bruni as studies ...”

“... in which the players are brought together on stage. The rich and powerful are here – including Edward VII and Hermann Goering – along with artists and ordinary johns; modest people who make a living out of sex, others who end up used and destroyed; well-heeled pimps and madames. At the edge of this satyricon is the vice squad; it was known originally as ...”

“... only friends in Nashville were white men. She took a trip to Muscle Shoals, Alabama with Edward Donahue in his mother’s ‘majestic old Lincoln. Nella brought some sandwiches. I brought a quart of liquor and the set-ups for high-balls. At Columbia, Tennessee I had to “pass” at a Negro restaurant.’ On another occasion, the police started ...”

“... peculiarities of the American political system that you can call the president a moron – or, as Thomas Friedman recently put it on the front page of the New York Times, ‘flat-out dumb’ – but you can’t call into question the sanctity or power of his office. Whatever your complaints, the president has ultimate military authority, and there are plenty ...”

“... essay in appreciation. He also did some delegation in order to complete the work. The life of Edward Young was written by Herbert Croft, who was more diligent than his master in unearthing facts, but whose pastiche of the Johnsonian style painfully illustrates how hard that style is to emulate. Even with these short cuts, and even with the assistance of ...”

“... 1788 around Linnaeus’s remarkable botanical collection, which was purchased for £1000 by James Edward Smith in 1783 and brought to London over the protest of all Swedish science. By the beginning of the Victorian era, the amateur tradition of the country naturalist and nature-appreciator – a tradition given great dignity and prestige by Gilbert White ...”

“... spirit’. Perhaps too medieval: Webb’s macabre wedding gift was a bedroom wardrobe decorated by Edward Burne-Jones with the blood libel story from Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’. The Virgin Mary – modelled by Jane – tends to St Nicholas, who had his throat cut by the Jews before miraculously returning to life.Furnishing the Red House inspired ...”