“... history has become exciting again. The long stand-off between Namierite history from above and Edward Thompson-style history from below is over, and a broader and more colourful view of the period has emerged. Much of the new historiography comes from the US and Canada, where its preoccupations – with empire and subject peoples, with law and ...”

“... virginal blood and of defloration in primitive societies’. The chief proponent of this view was Edward Westermarck (1862-1939), who, in his monumental History of Marriage, begun in 1891, furnished partial evidence for his theory from Herodotus, and from Brazil, the Caribbean, Senegal, Libya, Morocco, Kurdistan, Cambodia and Malabar, while steadfastly ...”

“... of Stratford-upon-Avon is the author of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed since the ...”

“... aimed at discrediting Kinsey; she is also the author of Kinsey, Sex and Fraud (co-written with Edward Eichel, a Manhattan psychotherapist) and Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences. In these books she equates Kinsey with Josef Mengele, accusing him of skewing his statistics to legitimise all sorts of perversions, of kidnapping and drugging ...”

“... humorous kindness. He never traded on his fame, was generous with royalties and encouraged young Welsh poets. He was also a good comforter of the sick, dying and desperate. As both son and grandson suggest, Elsi played her part in these silences. She seems to have been more sociable, well-travelled and practical than her husband, but she never ...”

“... he made are also extremely pretty. Sunlight casts shadows of delicate wooden screens on walls, young women in elaborate clothes lead idle lives. There are bright flowers and pet animals. Surely this delectable environment, with its convincing sense of ease, is a true reflection of the timeless Orient – of a real alternative world? But Yeazell points out ...”

“... his research on cirripedes and his zoological discussions with his correspondents. One of these, Edward Cresy, was in Paris around April 1848, and Darwin wrote begging him to ‘consult a work for me on sheep, (which would not take you more than half an hour) which I can not otherwise see.’ Not a word about French politics. Yet all work and no play, even ...”

“... advice, says Fleming, at any time. Autopsies had yielded some correlations of cause and effect. Edward Jenner (as well as developing the cow-pox vaccine) may have been the first to identify calcification of valves and arteries with angina. He was probably deterred from making this known by fear for his revered teacher, John Hunter, who was already suffering ...”

“... What really matters, I suspect, is that Nya is for him something to hold onto, like the novels of Edward Upward, which he also defends for their historical interest, relishing for example in The Spiral Ascent the word and the concept ‘poshocrat’. Like all Bagshaw-type historians, both Kermode and Cobb delight not only in the objects but in the attitudes ...”

“... finds him in Operational Research for the Air Force. He comes out of this experience an angry young man, shocked by the waste of lives in what he sees as senseless bombing of cities, and equally by official obtuseness in failing to accept measures that could have reduced the casualty rate among air crews. This chapter is followed by one about Frank ...”

“... was still obliged to cook the omelettes, since her husband would accept them from nobody else. Edward Garnett, Conrad’s literary adviser and intimate friend from early in his career, observed that his ‘ultra-nervous organisation appeared to make matrimony extremely hazardous’. The novelist was in fact subject to long bouts of depressive illness, and ...”

“... for puritans? Mr Murphy’s subject index has an entry reading: ‘Sexual abstinence of Irish young people ... 528’. Alas, page 528 has not a word about this ...”

“... to look like Monaco, or Portofino. Former President Gerald Ford – whose son acts in the soap The Young and the Restless – has once appeared as himself. So, too, has Henry Kissinger. At a charity ball in Denver, Joan Collins wafts up to Kissinger with the greeting: ‘Henry, I haven’t seen you since Portofino.’ In the most far-reaching words of his ...”

“... is that they contain two meanings. For instance, in Spring (1563), the head and shoulders of a young man is represented by many spring flowers. The particular meanings of man and flowers are not as meaningful as that there are two, instead of the usual one. Further, what is exciting is not the two meanings but the relationship between them, the gap and the ...”

“... but themselves. The relationship is the same in kind, though not in degree, as that between the young Israeli fighter and the parents who went, unresisting, into the concentration camps. The Six-Day War of 1967 represented a watershed: after it, reliance on Pan-Arabism was replaced by a flowering of Palestinian nationalism. Dimbleby supplies the necessary ...”