“... For after all, the inspiring motive for two of the other finest combatant poets of the Great War, Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney, was patriotism. One could, if one wished, even make Edward Thomas out to be a jingoist, for did he not write: But with the best and meanest Englishmen I am one in crying, God save England, lest ...”

“... later told a similar story. A Protestant pastor who knew Ivan’s Russia but who wasn’t there said that Ivan’s men raped the women and, when they resisted, the tsar had them beaten, had their nails and tongues torn out, then impaled them on red-hot stakes. Jerome Horsey, an Englishman who knew Ivan and was familiar with his world, but of whose colourful ...”

“... Scotland’s languages, sometimes improved by collision with English. Probably he meant it when he said that, if there had to be an international language, it should be Italian. While one great hero was certainly MacDiarmid, whose ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ he’d carried with him all through the war, another was Gramsci, introduced to him by ...”

“... GCHQ and Bill Odom of NSA, who regarded Marychurch as a patronising amateur. ‘Socially,’ Odom said, ‘I no longer find the British amusing, merely a pain in the ass.’ Kissinger, cross with Edward Heath, actually suspended intelligence relations with Britain in 1973. The two countries also suspected that each ...”

“... The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation (2005). Briefly, after World War Two the Edward Gibbon view of late antique history – Latin civilisation destroyed by Germanic barbarians – became thoroughly unwelcome in the new Europe, as too close to what had just happened and implying some kind of fault-line across the continent. A more ...”

“... of that era, to figure occasionally in fairy tales such as Attenborough’s Gandhi. E.J., or Edward, Thompson, seldom remembered these days, and always uneasy in his role as ‘friend of India’, was, on the other hand, involved with the country of his long domicile (from 1910-23) in a way that was often uncomfortable but always intimate; he reappears ...”

“... repetitions, threats, jokes and diversions, and his addiction to the ‘what I should have said’ school of retrospect, all contribute to a portrait of a mind that is not in control of its experience. The novel does not merely display the dark creatures of McLeish’s imagination, but follows his progress in taming them. A significant stage in his ...”

“... more to talk about. Nevertheless, it is encouraging to find a volume as solid and responsible as Edward Peters’s Torture, which traces the history of torture from the extraction of evidence from slave witnesses in criminal trials to the Inquisition, and on to its use, after a brief interruption, in our century as part of the ideological wars of ...”

“... met in Paris in the politically charged year of 1572. Sidney, then 17, had travelled there with Edward Fiennes de Clinton’s delegation for the signing of the Treaty of Blois, by which France and England agreed to set aside their traditional differences and join forces against Spain. Languet, who was then 54, had been sent by the Elector of Saxony to ...”

“... was born in Croydon, to a maritime family (he shared this background with his distant admirer Edward Carpenter). His early years were given over to colonial journeyings that left him self-conscious and unhappy: there were two voyages to Australia, on the second of which, in 1875, he got his first job, as a minor teacher in somewhere called Sparkes ...”

“... but page 503 makes it clear that initially it was (although the author might, have added that ‘Edward Bancroft, the American diplomat’ suggested by Lafayette for preliminary reconaissance, was also Edward ‘Edwards’ the English spy, which may have had something to do with the failure to hit the target). But the real ...”

“... stipend Harriman provided. This ‘mating dance’, Purnell writes, was her ‘true war work’. Edward R. Murrow was a celebrity foreign correspondent when they met. His dispatches from the front and from the bombed-out streets of London transfixed Americans and drew public opinion towards intervention. Purnell credits Pamela with advancing his ...”

“... no less, entitled A Guest of Honour. Even today, it has the air of a massive cultural oxymoron. Edward Berlin speculates that the libretto may celebrate Theodore Roosevelt’s politically dangerous invitation to a black man – the celebrated educationalist, Booker T. Washington – to dine at the White House. Styled a ‘ragtime opera’, A Guest of Honour ...”

“... of the modern game (hence the ‘local derby’), but such was the passion for it that, from Edward II on, English kings tried to ban it. Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV all passed edicts against it (it was getting in the way of archery and other martial pursuits). In 1457, James II of Scotland decreed that ...”

“... because it was the Capital of the Gold Rush. She describes her hero, then bearing the name Edward Muggeridge, arriving there in the autumn of 1855, a youth escaping a tedious provincial future in the family coal and grain business in Kingston-on-Thames. He had left England in 1852, but his three-year journey across America from New York has not been ...”