“... In an ill-fated military expedition of 1780 aimed at breaking the Spanish grip on Nicaragua, the young Captain Nelson shared a tent – and the rigours of jungle warfare – with Edward Despard, an Irish-born army engineer. Despard’s encounter with maroons and Mosquito Indians transformed his political outlook. Back in ...”

“... but frequently more discursive than some might think the occasion requires, as when the late Edward Said is chastised at length for his errant opinion of A Passage to India. Forster’s devotees, a party that includes the present editor, are clearly unwilling to treat the paralipomena of an admired author as undeserving of the fullest canonical ...”

“... of one hieroglyph. Dee was a curious figure: he was persuaded that his ‘scryer’ or medium, Edward Kelley (alias Talbot), could see angels in a seeing stone, and could have conversations with them. These ‘conversations’ were eventually published, with no friendly intent, by Méric Casaubon (the son of the anti-hermetic Isaac), and they record the ...”

“... so disoriented by unfamiliarity as I was when I first wandered through the show – not when I was young and first saw a portrait by Picasso or a drip painting by Pollock. These Egyptian artists’ paintings struck me as ugly, cartoonish: grotesquely mutilated and disembowelled bodies executed with huge emphatic brushstrokes, cruelly exposed women in twisted ...”

“... the 1920s and had been directed by Yeats. Other founding members included O’Hara, John Ashbery, Edward Gorey and Donald Hall, all recent Harvard graduates in their early twenties, as well as those like Lurie living in and around Cambridge. Older, established poets, such as Richard Wilbur and Richard Eberhart, added gravitas to the enterprise. ‘The ...”

“... the black meltwater on the ground floor. In dim corridors stacked to the ceiling with mattresses, young women are asleep on kitchen chairs or lying against the wall. Along trestle tables under the names of Ukrainian towns, a mob jostles to register. Over the din, I can hear the howl of pop music in the square, the cheers of the crowd, the sound of bass voices ...”

“... editor reproduced a small photograph of a small portrait copied from a very small photograph of a young woman named, so Mossy averred, Nora Joseph Barnacle. A name, I need not tell you, well known by then throughout the world of literature.’ ‘Barnacle?’ said Hunty. ‘But that is a kind of goose.’ ‘Mossy’s story about it was that some ten years ...”

“... construct. It is now clear that More was not averse to advancement: he was a realist and he had a young family, as well as others, to support. A little earlier than the time that Erasmus was writing, he had already put into words the Tudor image of a villainous Richard III. Though this was not printed either in English or in Latin until after his death, the ...”

“... that myself, at the age of four, could identify by name any or all of the coloured plates in Edward Step’s Wayside and Woodland Blossoms ... not content with the English names, I memorised many of the Latin and Greek ones as well. Some of these (at the age of eight) I conceitedly incorporated in a school essay ... The headmaster read the essay aloud to ...”

“... the formidable generation of scholars and translators of Japanese who encountered the country as young men during the US occupation – are homosexual. ‘Travellers almost by definition screw more (or want to screw more) than other people,’ Richie writes, and nowhere are they more avid in their screwing than in Japan. In the case of expat men, I would ...”

“... For a Russian soldier, the Caucasus was the warm, southern equivalent of Scott’s Highlands: an Edward Waverley from Moscow or St Petersburg might expect adventure, romance, intrigue, death. The mountains of the region were fabled (Noah’s ark was supposed to have passed through the twin peaks of Mount Elborus). Beyond the natural border of the River Terek ...”

“... literary service publishing the personal experiences of those entrusted with the care of the young of administering corporal correction and providing them with a media for the frank expression of opinion.Corpun’s ‘unique literary service’ actually consisted of pamphlets, often with introductions by eager clergymen, entitled Girl’s ...”

“... have lived in Hampstead and gone to Robert Bevan’s Sundays, or tramped with Eleanor Farjeon to Edward Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called them, ‘as amorphous as friends can be’, they were nearly all highly literate, and judged accordingly. They treated her as a kind of peg-top ...”

“... Born in 1740, the heir of a cool, clever Lowland laird and lawyer, he became very rapidly a young literary lion, an acquaintance of Rousseau and Voltaire, the close friend, not just of Samuel Johnson, but of a broad sample of London’s cultural and fashionable élite, the celebrated biographer of the Corsican nationalist, Pasquale Paoli, a man, or so ...”

“... he had complained about his bad press: he supposes he must have found it ‘painful, having been a young lion of the Sixties, generally encouraged by the media, to find myself an abused figure of the Seventies. Don’t ever believe anyone who says that a bad press doesn’t hurt.’ Old diaries often surprise their authors: they ought to tidy them up, before ...”