“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... always been the case that Arabs were seen in France as bearers of ‘manliness’. In Orientalism, Edward Said identified an earlier stereotype – the effeminate, youthful, available Arab – by reading across a wide range of scholarship, fiction, poetry and art, mostly English and French, all of it produced in the imperial era. The threat – and the allure ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sunday Times and for co-authoring books on Eva Peron and Onassis. However, Nick, under the name Edward, or Ned, is one of the most important characters in The Furies and it is obvious she was very fond of him and regretted the breakdown of her marriage. Her narrator, Helen, says: ‘I dream about Ned, as I am to dream about him for years and years to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Moon (1894), does not, as popular belief has it, depict John and Salome, but ‘Narraboth, the young Syrian’, who ‘loves Salome and kills himself out of jealousy; and his homosexual admirer, the Page of Herodias ... who urges Narraboth to look at the moon’ – the face of Wilde – ‘rather than at Salome’. She underscores the sexual ambiguity ...”

“... year, having composed an ode celebrating the Jameson Raid and the well-known lines on the death of Edward VII. Along the electric wires the message came, He is no better, he is much the same. That at least is funny – indeed positively good in its way – and preferable to the era of Ghastly Good Taste in public verses that was to follow. Even Day-Lewis was ...”

“... Oxford from 1981 to 1989, his career has been all of a piece. The scholar, the actor, the dashing young subaltern and the Union debater, have all gone into the making of this extremely elegant and rather grand figure. In teaching, research and administration his career is a testament to the rise of a new professionalism in the Universities since 1945. But ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”