“... They were always closest to his heart: in 1529 he dreamed of his death, of how a handsome young man told him to pack and be on his way. He would take, he decided, only his New Testament and Paraphrases and his edition of St Jerome, his great mentor. That would be enough for heaven. He could have taken much more. By then, he had also further revised ...”

“... for example, that other lost play, The Fronny) reconstructed by the patient detective work of Edward Mendelson, repeatedly exemplify this association. The Enemies of a Bishop (1929), published here for the first time, ends with Robert Bicknell shooting his Spectre, a crime the village policeman greets with typical equanimity: Policeman: Ee’s ...”

“... alters to introduce the obligatory royal story; or the official biographer’s treatment of Edward VII’s gluttony. Edward loved huge amounts of rich food and pigged himself all day, every day, eating quickly and eagerly: even his coronation had to be postponed due to appendicitis brought on by over-eating. His ...”

“... Proverbs of Heaven which made it necessary for him to issue some of the other sort. So that when Edward Bond appropriated Blake, ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires,’ he vitiated it with his tacit pretence that the prevalence in our day is that everyone is going about nursing unacted desires. Given these contraries, it will ...”

“... great and small, saw him thus; as I have said, a few abstained, including his friend Edward FitzGerald, but at the same time had to acknowledge the majority view; and Tennyson himself came to share the general opinion of the nature of his greatness. Confident of an exclusive vocation, he was able to devote his entire life to poetry (he simply ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... July 1945 were given strict instructions to turn their backs on the initial blast. The physicist Edward Teller refused to obey orders. He put on an extra pair of dark glasses under welder’s goggles, smeared his face with ointment, and looked straight at the aim point, not wanting to miss a second of the atomic age. In the decades that followed, Teller ...”

“... Edward​ Long arrived ‘home’ in the ‘mother country’ in 1769 with his wife and three young children after 12 years as a planter in Jamaica. His return presented no problems. He was a colonist, a ‘freeborn Englishman’, welcomed back to ‘his’ country. His wife came, as he did, from an elite white dynasty and his children, though they were born in Jamaica, inherited his birthright ...”

“... if we are not so daunted, it may be a sign that we are not taking those works very seriously. The young may well feel gratified by the confidence rested in their sophistication: but older readers, who tackled the works before Post-Modernism happened along, are bound to reflect wryly on their pitiful efforts of yesteryear; they must have resembled primitive ...”

“... known under Gorbachev. For Stalin’s youth, he follows broadly speaking the pioneering work of Edward Ellis Smith – but rightly rejects Smith’s assertion that Stalin was an agent of the Tsarist secret police. For the role of Stalin in 1917 Slusser’s book provides a reliable guide. One finds little to quarrel with either in Conquest’s scholarship or ...”

“... Stella) can have over adults is usually presented as something sinister. One variant shows the young as the occasion of supernatural occurrences – poltergeists, ghosts and so forth. Another (seen in A High Wind in Jamaica) shows them as amoral, powerful through a kind of animal innocence, not knowing their own cruelty. An Awfully Big Adventure could be ...”

“... Cabinet, which was where Dawson, the villain of this book, went wrong. Dawson intrigued to unseat Edward VIII (a good thing, as it happened, but none of his business) and was the architect of his newspaper’s appeasement-of-Hitler policy, his belief being that the Empire, in which he took an obsessive interest, was not at that stage fully behind ...”

“... though he found Lindbergh ‘as nice as can be’. He described him as ‘like a bright, young chauffeur’. Ludovic Kennedy draws attention to a disagreeable side of Lindbergh’s character: a taste for aggressive practical jokes. But he was fearless, and an inspired mechanic. When he took off at dawn on 20 May 1927 for his historic flight across ...”

“... is the opposite of the homely expertise in country matters of Hardy, or the more pointed one of Edward Thomas. The disinclination to be specific, in terms of the world of real things, gives its own sort of bleak originality to the world of Davie’s poetry – a world very much more extensive than this aspect of it would seem to indicate. The most striking ...”