“... would spend weeks at a time cooped up in what one them described as ‘a floating steel box’. Edward Pullen, who served in the First World War aboard a destroyer in the North Sea, remembered: There was no life at all aboard a destroyer . . . you couldn’t stand up, you couldn’t sit down and you couldn’t walk about . . . And we always had a rope round ...”

“... currency for every Eurozone country,’ the French economist Michel Aglietta and his co-author, Thomas Brand, write in Un New Deal pour l’Europe. ‘It binds them to rigidly fixed exchange rates, regardless of their underlying economic realities, and strips them of monetary autonomy.’ For Aglietta, a currency is essentially a social contract: behind it ...”

“... characteristically wiped her mouth and pulled her blouse down, in preparation for kissing me. ‘Thomas dear!’ she said. ‘Tommy. Are you all right?’ She held me. Unfortunately this has been her question since I went away to university. ‘Yes, all in all, I am.’ Her grip relaxed a little. ‘You’re dyeing your hair,’ she accused. ‘I am not ...”

“... content. He was not the only actor of his age to have developed a ‘great melody’ – Edward Gibbon was another – but he has to be known in this way, and Dr O’Brien has set out to depict the ‘great melody’ as formed by what he was and by the grand issues – the themes to which the subtitle alludes – to which he gave himself. This is not ...”

“... to belong to a British literature, and that many of his favourite poets wrote in English. And, as Thomas Crawford has shown, much of the folk repertoire he studied was common to both the northern and southern halves of the island. It is also true that Scots and English are branches of the same language, and that Burns was not, in the customary meaning of the ...”

“... The leading spirits in the theatricals were the Rector’s elder children: James, born 1765, Edward (who later took the surname Knight), born 1767, Henry, born 1771. The younger children – Cassandra, born 1773, Francis, born 1774, Jane, born 1775, and Charles, born 1779 – almost certainly took lesser parts or acted as onlookers and audience. The ...”

“... Fighting off the attempted depredations of marauding Baconians, scholars such as Edward Dowden (one of the first Human beings ever to earn his living by teaching Shakespeare) related the plays to an imaginary, Darwinesque, smoothly evolutionary ‘life’ of the playwright, whose narrative embodied many of the age’s presuppositions ...”

“... Session. No other reigning sovereign had visited the principal university buildings since King Edward VII opened them in 1905. Six months before the Queen’s visit, the Vice-Chancellor, Professor J.M. Whittaker, put to his recently-appointed Professor of English Literature a ‘general idea’ – to celebrate the Queen’s visit by reviving the masques ...”

“... Momigliano’s ‘Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical Method’, and Giuseppe Giarrizzo’s Edward Gibbon e la cultura europea del Settecento, the historian of the Roman Empire has himself become the object of serious historical study. It can still be maintained that his work is, in D.R. Woolf’s words, ‘probably the most famous and perhaps the most ...”

“... that people had overheard the Goodings using in conversation, such as ‘bloody old cow’. Edward Swan told the police that he had ‘heard them use the language that was on the postcard’. Often they were sent to people with whom Rose had recently had contact. Several times, as a kindness, she had sent some cakes or a bit of fish to the young son of ...”

“... flight of the mind takes him to famous poems like Paradise Lost, once famous poems such as Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-45), and less familiar works such as Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination (1744). He ends with a chapter on Baroque painted ceilings.Celestial ascent at death is an ancient idea. In its earliest known ...”

“... Orchestra (1939) might slot seamlessly into a concert programme of English string pieces like Edward Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings and Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, but by the time of his third opera, The Knot Garden, first performed in 1970, Tippett was using an electric guitar, keyboard and drum kit to pump the liberating ...”

“... Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and T.E. Lawrence, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf – this is just a small sampling. Basically, he read his way through the Marylebone public library. He periodically put this ...”

“... between ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky’ (line 2 of ‘Prufrock’) and Thomas Hardy’s ‘forms there flung/Against the sky’ (‘The Abbey Mason’); between ‘certain half-deserted streets’ (line 4 of ‘Prufrock’) and ‘he sought out a certain street and number’ in Chapter 20 of Little Dorrit; or, moving beyond ...”

“... part of a verse of the Old Hundredth (the name Waugh gave to one of his fictional night-clubs). Edward FitzGerald chose that verse for his tombstone, well-remembering the 12th-century verse he had translated from the Persian: ‘We are helpless: thou hast made us what we are.’ Henry VI wrote a prayer: Domine Jesu, qui me creasti, redimsti et preordinaste ...”