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“... flourishes. The poster for the exhibition is Holbein’s portrait of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VI; he’s not the weed that he’s normally pictured but a big solid bully of a baby, the image of his father. On the Underground R. says he’s never known a poster so persistently defaced, the child’s brutal look seeming to irritate people. One poster ...”

“... impulse’ and ‘moral insanity’ had allowed the would-be assassin of Queen Victoria, Edward Oxford, to escape the gallows three years previously. The doctors, for their part, criticised the M’Naghten Rules for failing to take any account of the unconscious. What, they asked, was the law to do with murderers who were rational, conscious of ...”

“... guests talking about Nietzsche. ‘Elbert Hubbard did all your reading for you,’ the publishers said. ‘His book will make you so well informed – you’ll never need to feel embarrassed or uncomfortable in company again.’ Of late, the uneducated, and even the educated, have been well served, for the familiar thick tomes of ...”

“... journal ArabLit, nearly all of them complained about being stereotyped. The Syrian poet Fady Jomar said that he now ‘refuses to talk about being a refugee at all’. Ramy al-Asheq, a Palestinian-Syrian poet and journalist, said that Europeans gravitated to ‘sexy stories’, that they wanted refugees to ‘show us how ...”

“... poet, is true of time. And saying so to some Means nothing; others it leaves Nothing to be said. Such poetry does not ‘say so’ but leaves ‘nothing to be said’. Like time, it collaborates only with silence, always invoked in Larkin’s poetic medium. Donald Davie has an expressive metaphor for the other kind ...”

“... escape from it, and so she can escape into new difficulties: ‘“My head’s free at last!” said Alice in a tone of delight, which changed into alarm in another moment.’ She may well be privy to a secret Carroll confided to his diary in 1855: ‘There is, I verily believe, a sensation of pain in the realisation of our highest pleasures, knowing that ...”

“... future. The military details will be familiar to many from school history lessons. Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, having overcome the doubts of some of his own commanders, marched south from Derby to confront the hastily mustered Hanoverian army under the direct command of George II. As in previous engagements, the numerical superiority of ...”

“... hit Frieda and wanted to exterm-inate whole races; Virginia Woolf was a pretentious snob who said horrible things about the plebeian Joyce, and about the girls who worked at Woolworths; James Kelman acted like a barbarian at the Booker dinner, and so on. Most of these commentators imagine themselves to be writing a form of intellectual history when they ...”

“... lamp would be burning, and we would talk about politics, Labour questions, Emerson, Ruskin, Edward Carpenter, right into the night.’ Nellie Gawthorpe was another who thrived in this atmosphere. Brought up in the working-class respectability of a red-brick terrace in north Leeds, she was transformed by the discussions held at her local Pupil ...”

“... Austen Chamberlain’s displacement as Conservative leader in 1922 came as a rude shock. It was said that he always played the game and always lost it; having lost, his recriminations were private; in public he continued to play the game, in due course receiving the Foreign Office as a consolation prize. Nor did his brother Neville relish being ousted as ...”

“... a servile national identity. Less a nation of shopkeepers than of butlers – the most that can be said of a true patriot in Ukania is that he is ‘a loyal servant of the Crown’. The ideal, it seems, is the Admirable Crichton. We even have a labour movement so denatured and corrupted by instinctive Ukanian authoritarianism that it takes a reactionary ...”

“... Edward Thompson’s Customs in Common is described as a ‘companion volume’ to his The Making of the English Working Class, and rises to the occasion. It has the wide range of reference, the densely-textured documentation, a special quality of charged impressionism (sometimes tendentious, more often honourably concerned with generous perspectives and panoramic insight), the embattled moral fervour, which established the earlier book as a classic of historical scholarship and indeed of English letters ...”

“... What were you like as a child?’ Dick Cavett asked Edward Gorey on his talk show in November 1977. ‘Small,’ he replied. Gorey, who died in 2000 at the age of 75, did not like to talk about himself or his work, which depended, like the Japanese literature he admired, ‘very much [on] what is left out’. Someone who thought of himself principally as a writer, but is now remembered chiefly as an artist and illustrator of his own and other people’s work, Gorey created a peculiar, hermetic world in which the comic and the macabre combine in proportions dependent on the reader’s temperament ...”

“... Burckhardt, William Thomson (known as Osman effendi), John Gardner Wilkinson, Robert Hay and Edward Lane also ‘went native’ on their travels. Like Champollion, they aped the robes and turbans of the Ottoman ruling class, browned their skin, and made a show of living in ‘Oriental’ style. Hay, Burton and Gardner Wilkinson took their sex lives ...”

“... ambitions in the 19th century is to focus on the role of technology. This is the approach taken by Edward Gillin, a historian of science, in his entertaining overview. The Crimean crisis can itself be seen as an attempt by these two technologically superior countries to intimidate the Ottomans into accepting their political guidance in return for military ...”