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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mainly by inference. For example, the first poem the adolescent Eliot fell in love with was Edward Fitzgerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Fitzgerald was exclusively attracted to men – though like Eliot embarked on an unhappy marriage – and the Rubáiyát itself was addressed in Persian to a young boy, which Eliot, with his interest in ...”

“... I do not think that, till the end of his days, he regarded me as a serious writer.’ Conrad, whom Edward Garnett brought to Ford’s cottage at Bonnington in September 1898, was not much of an improvement. Every inch the ship’s captain, he thrust his hands firmly into the pockets of his reefer-coat and pointed his ‘black torpedo beard’ in a vaguely ...”

“... Marx family grave. Eleanor’s ending was sad. She became infatuated with a Socialist rogue called Edward Aveling. He set up house with Eleanor and became her husband in all but name. This continued for some years. In June 1897 Aveling married Eva Frye, an actress of 22. He continued to live with Eleanor until August, when he spent a few days with his wife. In ...”

“... a monk and a rosary each. The list of stars in the film (Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, all the others mentioned elsewhere in this piece) is a clue to what we are watching. They are all themselves, bringing with them the clouds of movies they have been in. They have come to the party. This effect is largely kept up by the ...”

“... Simone Signoret. ‘There were other beautiful girls who could paint at the time,’ the architect Edward Jones recalled, ‘but none who were quite as wonderful as her.’ She had an acting career on the side, including a bit part in Alfie. She was almost cast as the lead in Darling, before Julie Christie came along. She danced on Ready Steady Go!, modelled ...”

“... to conjecture of this sort. In 1944, during a conversation very much designed to go on record, she said: ‘I think that actual life supplies a writer with characters much less than is thought ... People in life hardly seem to be definite enough to appear in print. They are not good or bad enough, or clever or stupid enough, or comic or pitiful enough.’ When ...”

“... I thought very little about him until around ten years ago, when my friend James Fenton, the poet, said that on a trip to South Korea he had been approached by a Korean professor who asked him if it was true that ‘ck’ in the name ‘Cockburn’ was not pronounced. When James asked him why he was interested the professor explained that he was writing a book ...”

“... Theory and Practice. I won’t go into all that again, although there is plenty more that could be said. By someone else. My own role at the conference had little to do with debates about critical theory. I was there as a kind of relic from the past, as someone who used to edit ‘little magazines’. My function, it seemed, was to represent a marginalised ...”

“... highbrow with intellectual leanings’ but ‘a simple, rather stupid man’. This may have been said only to outbid Elspeth Huxley in a modesty contest, but he could sometimes be genuinely overawed by the company. Arriving at a very grand luncheon party, he saw ‘ten sophisticated guests assembled’ and would have bolted had his wife not been there to ...”