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“... the longed-for past almost certainly didn’t feel as wonderful at the time as it does in memory. Edward Manners, aesthete and voyeur, the splendidly creepy narrator of Hollinghurst’s second novel, The Folding Star (1994), is infatuated with his 17-year-old pupil, in love largely with the memory of being 17 himself. The Swimming Pool Library is elegiac not ...”

“... for example), applied art and a scattering of public sculpture. Then there were artists – Edward Bawden, for example, and Edward Burra – who were also topographers, decorators or illustrators; in the 1930s even Graham Sutherland would have qualified. They carried on doing very English things on which ...”

“... popular images of the Enlightenment have retained considerable force. Textbooks (including Colin Jones’s superb new one) have repeated them to new generations of readers, while literary historians such as Daniel Mornet have taken them for granted and proceeded to tell the story of the Enlightenment’s steady diffusion outwards from its Parisian source. In ...”

“... to ‘usually gives’. The sentence wasn’t included at all in the book. At Wilde’s trial, Edward Carson used the text of Dorian as evidence against Wilde, and made a clear distinction between the two versions, referring to the book as ‘the purged edition’. But the story, as Frankel makes clear, is not as simple as that. Lippincott’s, using a ...”

“... 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. On the two occasions when competent and ruthless kings rebuilt it (Edward III, then Henry V), infuriatingly self-indulgent kings lost it (Richard II, then Henry VI). The uselessness of the two latter monarchs had led to their murder by ambitious would-be replacements; nobility had been so unimpressed by the ...”

“... of his exotic cast, to leaven the lump of company accounts, technology and policy. Sir Roderick Jones, head and dominant owner of Reuters in the Twenties and Thirties, was a snob. He liked to employ Etonians, partly, to do him justice, because Reuters men were supposed to be able to mix easily with diplomats and foreign ministers. In 1933 the Etonian Ian ...”

“... got what they wanted; that virtue and patience were ultimately rewarded. The Introduction, by Edward Shils, to Cambridge Women, a collection of essays on the lives of 12 (dead) women more or less – and some pretty remotely – connected with the University, is an extreme example of this second approach. He praises the Cambridge women of the past, and of ...”

“... rain and dullness: it’s ‘literally my personal hell on earth’. There, she falls in love with Edward Cullen, one of a small sect who call themselves ‘ethical’ or ‘vegetarian’ vampires, having elected to hunt wild animals instead of feeding off human blood. Edward loves Bella too; but he can barely let himself ...”

“... his opinions tend to contradict each other as well as theirs. Writing to his first publisher Edward Jones in 1936, he reports: ‘Last week Auden wrote to me saying what a corking good comic (I like that word) poet I was.’ I wish one could be sure about the tone of that parenthesis. Betjeman can hardly have been straightforwardly pleased at being ...”

“... sketched in: Thomas has a daughter called Stella, and the fourth sibling, James, has a son called Edward, though his biological father might actually have been Thomas. The family firm, General Roll, deals in player pianos and the punched paper rolls they require. There are assets involved, liabilities and potentially power struggles of the sort familiar from ...”

“... of the London Library opposite the lift holds a collection of rare and beautiful editions of Edward FitzGerald’s poem, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Since its first publication in 1859, it has appeared in every size and shape, giant and toy, on vellum and silk, in fabulous bindings stamped with peacocks’ tails and nightingales’ eyes; it has been ...”

“... as described by Jeanne Mackenzie in Children of the Souls: she concentrated on Raymond Asquith, Edward Horner and six other subalterns killed in World War One. They seemed, in Diana Cooper’s view, to have no appetite for life: ‘they had grown up,’ said Jeanne Mackenzie, ‘in a society that was half in love with death.’ Russell served in that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and never better than when she’s proposing a revaluation of someone wrongly discounted, like Edward Thomas. The first two essays in this book deal with Thomas, one relating him to Frost, the other to the English tradition – a sturdier strain of poetry than either the Georgian mode prevalent at the time Edward Thomas ...”

“... her husband, their surviving son and their servants, the household included their new friends Edward and Jane Williams, their children and servants, and Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont.Clairmont’s five-year-old daughter with Byron, Allegra, had died of typhus (or possibly malaria) only a few days earlier, in the convent near Ravenna where her ...”