“... concealed beneath the name of a “great man”?’ (She refers to the Shakespearean contender, Edward de Vere, as ‘the Count of Oxford’ – someone who truly never was.) Peter Gay​ and others saw Freud’s early bafflement as instilling heroic habits of curiosity. Whitebook places more stress on the trauma rather than the Oedipal conundrum, and on ...”

“... part of the reason her singing speaks to us so deeply is the pain in her voice. After her death, James Mason, her co-star in A Star Is Born, said that she gave so much of herself on stage and screen there was ‘no currency in which to repay her’. One of her favourite currencies seems to have been applause, and after MGM dropped her, singing on stage ...”

“... I would have liked to have gone to Columbia, to study comparative literature with Edward Said, but I had no way to make that happen. So I signed on, read books, went home to help my disconsolate mother, then discovered that the same now unimaginable fiscal laxity that allowed me to claim Supplementary Benefit, as it was then called, also ...”

“... universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that ...”

“... a delicate woman: small and gamine in appearance, even in her starched VAD uniform. (Her brother Edward, who won a Military Cross on the first day of the Somme and died in June 1918, a few days after my uncle Newton, towers over her by at least a foot in family photographs.) And in many ways she was delicate in spirit too. Insanity ran in the family – she ...”

“... of Lord Justice O’Connor, whose account of his contacts with the Conservarive Party leader Sir Edward Carson in January 1921 are especially interesting. O’Connor reported that he ‘understood Carson to be in favour of ultimate unity, through the means of the Council of Ireland set up under the Home Rule Act’ and gave details of two further meetings ...”

“... a pink babygro with the slogan ‘I’m a full-time job’ on sale in the entrance hall and Selma James, the feminist writer and activist who helped found the ECP, is being trailed around the building by an old white sheepdog and a young black Labrador. Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel about industrial Manchester, begins with the disappearance of ...”

“... have survived since at least the 15th century, a relic still of a ceremony that went out under Edward VI, is as vivid and evocative as any screen or wall-painting (though there are those too). Of course Puddletown figures in Hardy’s history and there are names on the war memorial – Sparks, for instance – of his cousins and relatives, the church ...”

“... who briefly worked with her father, died in 1854, Dickinson contacted a complete stranger, Edward Everett Hale, asking for details of Newton’s final hours. ‘You may think my desire strange,’ she wrote, but there was no one else to ‘satisfy’ her ‘inquiries’. Aged fourteen, she was led away from the bedside of a dying schoolfriend after ...”

“... like a year. I went to make some money and spent all of it while I was there.Was that when you met James Dickey?He played bluegrass music and he had this lake on his property and was forever showing off his muscles and thighs. At one point he said: ‘Yes, I’m so big, I’m so goddamn big! And no cocksucking English critic’s gonna tell me any ...”

“... meals proceeded from kitchen to dining room by miniature railway, they owned a London house in St James’s Square, a Highland estate on the island of Jura, and a 16-bedroom seaside ‘cottage’ at Sandwich in Kent. Waldorf and Nancy Astor and their five children somehow found the time to live in all four; worried about the safety of Jura milk, Nancy had her ...”

“... one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her bedroom that night clutching his ...”

“... the loan-shark hoods who patrolled these waters. I once saw a movie called The Gambler starring James Caan as a self-destructive university lecturer addicted to gambling. The protagonist has a fair bit of my brother in him, enough that when I walked out of the movie theatre in 1974, three years after my brother’s death, I was shaken. Someone once ...”

“... inactive in the face of so much ‘corruption’. But that is the lot of many activist groupings. Edward Daffarn, a resident from the 16th floor who wrote many emails to the council, and Francis O’Connor, who wrote many of the blogs, were committed local agitators with a deep disgust at what the council and its TMO was failing to do for the poorer people of ...”

“... of the judiciary. On the occasion of his retirement as Recorder of London in July 1990, Sir James Miskin gave a television interview to the BBC. ‘That was a mad decision, was it not?’ he said of the Court of Appeal’s judgment in the Guildford case. ‘They didn’t give any thought to the fact that three years after it had happened there was a ...”