“... Tamerlane, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun can hardly be dismissed as unimportant, but it must be said that little of world-shaking significance has happened there lately, although there are signs that this may now be changing. The most famous Inner Asian of our own times was probably Irving Berlin, and he left at a very early age. Where the Golden Horde has ...”

“... closeness was what she had experienced with her mother and it was what she was used to. She once said that if a person you love commits suicide, as her mother did, you spend the rest of your life trying to find similar relationships and playing out the ending you never had with the person who died. As a writer, too, Janet was mainly interested in her own ...”

“... in extenuation it might be pleaded that the theme was friendship, not unfriendliness. It should be said straight away that the selection of poems in Emrys Jones’s New Oxford Book of 16th-Century Verse is quite splendid, a veritable treasure house (to use a ludicrous outdated trope); there are no shocking omissions to deprecate, and if some of the poems are ...”

“... of Past and Present – his ‘Tract for the Times’, though ‘not in the Pusey vein’, as he said – with its eloquent attacks on aristocratic partridge-shooting and Parliamentary do-nothingism and its sympathetic exposure of the wretchedness of the urban poor, Carlyle visited Liverpool. He described conditions in Formby in a (hitherto ...”

“... the Community’s spokesmen, advocates or analysts had ever disguised its ambitions. In 1962, when Edward Heath was first negotiating terms for British membership, one of his French interlocutors – later a minister – made the point in words reminiscent of a British Army marching song. ‘We don’t know where we’re going,’ he ...”

“... today. Galen, prince of ancient physicians, was by any standards a penetrating thinker. In 1798 Edward Jenner, a hero in the pantheon of physicians, described the use of cow-pox matter to prevent smallpox. This piece of detective work remains a classic. Jenner’s observational powers are also testified to by his being the first to note that it is the ...”

“... Cairns, delivered a farewell speech in which he reflected on the political situation. Ulster, he said, had been cynically betrayed by Britain’s policies: policies that had relegated it to ‘the status of a Fuzzy Wuzzy colony’. The Lord Mayor’s parting shot is one of my favourite quotations, for as well as being banal, ridiculous, righteously angry and ...”

“... on one side of James’s divide – that of feeling the past familiar. Not that Russell can be said to have made it interesting, for in his torrid film all the hysteria and none of the genius of the English on Lake Geneva has been caught and condensed into ninety minutes of writhing in mud, blood, rats, leeches, spit and foam (mostly from Claire’s ...”

“... dreams of global fellowship and exchange as the foundation of modernity. Bardaouil argues that Edward Said’s Orientalism sets up too rigid a polarity between East and West, and that his views have inadvertently contributed to nationalist isolation; he respects Said and his book’s historic importance but points ...”

“... must, if it is to have a chance of winning the next election, adopt a ‘conservative’ line. Edward Kennedy is not being repudiated only because of his morals. The liberals of the eastern seaboard are in a defeated state of chaos and confusion. The socialist parties of Western Europe rely for their support on mindless trade-unionists or equally mindless ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In February​ 1840, Edward FitzGerald came home to find Alfred Tennyson installed on the sofa, grimy and stinking of tobacco. He was in a bad way, argumentative and restless; his griping was so incessant that FitzGerald asked him to call ‘a truce’ on his complaints. As was his habit, Tennyson stayed for a few days, and then disappeared, perhaps going back to Epping Forest, where his brother Septimus was in an asylum, or to his family’s new house in Tunbridge Wells, or up to Lincolnshire and his cottage in Mablethorpe, where he could wander the long, empty beaches and the post arrived no more than once a week ...”

“... in at the start. Her family would never leave houses alone. ‘We Are Not Removing’ the placards said. So many of them painted up in Effie’s kitchen at Number 11. The women who came to the meetings were not of the poorest. They had well-mended dresses and petticoats and boots. Once the strike was going, some of the women travelled to Govan from the groves ...”

“... could be seen in the documents previously available. She told Rupert that when she was a child Edward Garnett had looked her over and said: ‘ “Heart-hard. Hard as nails!” I grinned with pride, and never forgot.’ Trying to push Rupert away from her, in 1912, Noel confessed: ‘The better things need passion: and ...”

“... Jack Benny’s wife, Mary Livingston, could buy two quarts of Vent Vert perfume. ‘Bill Paley said you could do it,’ she told Schoenbrun, by way of thanks. An example, Halberstam rather tendentiously concludes, of how ‘news was becoming less and less important; entertainment was bigger and bigger.’ Such little episodes are the best and brightest ...”