“... 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 ...”

“... the US today it is reckoned that there are more poets than readers of poetry, and that many of the young poets read no poetry but their own. If that is true, the new poetry is mostly therapeutic, and belongs to the history of psychology rather than of literature. I have no idea whether or not Victorian poetry issued from significantly different motives and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”