“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... two differences. In Huston’s version, one of the doctors attending the demonstration is the young Freud himself, fresh off the train from Vienna. And, more significant, while in Brouillet’s painting the audience’s eyes converge on a female subject who fully obeys the will of her Master, Huston also portrays a male patient, no less hysterical and ...”

“... earlier. (Associated as it is with a sexually transmitted disease, and administered mostly to young women, the HPV vaccine has been an alembic for all sorts of fear and anxiety around female sexuality.) In the weeks following the initial hospitalisations, another 75 girls from the same school came forward with similar symptoms; before long, five hundred ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the Cambridge of the 1820s, of the ladies of the town whom there is no reason to suppose that young Charles frequented. ‘Simple, childlike, painstaking, effective’ – Harriet Martineau’s judgment was precise. This is not obviously the stuff of high drama and seething passions: but high drama and seething passions for Desmond and Moore are what ...”

“... did not give the right signals. The representation of employers was equally defective. Sir Edward Herbert died before the Report had been signed. Mr R.B. Southall and Sir David Anderson ‘belonged’, in Mr Carswell’s words, ‘to the silent minority’. All four members of the ‘inner group’, as Mr Carswell defines it, were academics. The most ...”

“... Magness explains in Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth, there were good reasons for the young country to think of the site as ‘a symbol of Jewish heroism, the Zionist enterprise, and the state of Israel’. ‘The notion that heroic Jewish freedom fighters held out against the mighty Roman Empire to the bitter end countered the image of millions ...”

“... in exploring the sliver of political space between irony and bigotry. Among them is Toby Young, who originally found fame as the butt of his own joke with his memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (2001). The game is a quest for attention, and humorous transgression is the key skill in winning it. Another name for it is ...”

“... family annuities expired. He so inhabited his dour poetic persona that his friend and publisher Edward Hookham, writing to the Literary Fund, ‘had but too just reason to dread that the Fate of Chatterton might be that of Peacock’. The committee awarded him £30. Numerous failed courtships intensified the gloom. Peacock was, his cousin remembered, ‘a ...”

“... in the American South. In this wave of iconoclasm, Cecil Rhodes, Silent Sam, Robert E. Lee and Edward Colston were practically surrogates for each other in a transnational story of empire, colonialism and slavery – a story that demanded retelling with renewed attention to its victims. Like some businesses, churches and government agencies, universities ...”

“... with the ground-floor bay window and the attic, at 40 Richmond Road, Leicester, where William Edward Snow and his wife Ada Sophia brought up their family of four sons. Ada Sophia had a nose like that of the most distinguished of her sons, with a slight downward curve. She had ‘dignity of bearing’ – another resemblance to the future baron, for ‘he ...”