“... their voices.Peter, now nine, went back to Gezira Preparatory School where, according to Edward Said, a fellow pupil, lessons were ‘mystifyingly English: we read about meadows, castles, and Kings John, Alfred and Canute with the reverence that our teachers kept reminding us they deserved.’ Equally baffling was the tradition of celebrating the ...”

“... was heard to say, ‘my son has bought a motorbike and my daughter has become a Christian.’ As a young don, he was turned down on religious grounds by the first great love of his life, the daughter of a great Anglican family. In the aftermath of this rejection, he thought ‘a definitely agnostic atmosphere is essential for my free development of work and of ...”

“... 1760s, is often said to be a portrait of Barber. It shows a fine-featured, rather dreamy-looking young man in three-quarters profile, with a high forehead and finely curled black hair somewhat receding at the temples. If this is a portrait of him, it is in at least one respect an idealised image – the skin is smooth, with none of the markings of ...”

“... the delicious Money-Coutts. (Money Counts?) There was even a triple-barrelled name: Edward Packe-Drury-Lowe – inherently absurd because of the prospect of infinite fission: if triple, why not quadruple or quintuple? One of the boys in my house had the surname Christie. His father owned Glyndebourne. ‘Christie’ meant something to me, so I ...”

“... Nigeria as ‘a hostile environment for the life of the mind’. In this context the sighting of a young woman on a bus reading a literary hardback would set his pulses racing even if the book didn’t happen to be by Michael Ondaatje. Cultural frameworks aren’t neutral. There’s an uncomfortable incident late in the book when a friend’s mother, a ...”

“... Wooster, audibly something of a waster, has a first name which associates him with the womanising Edward VII, but with that surname, a cockerel with a weak r, a Wooster trying to be a Rooster, he could never hope to be a hit with the ladies. As for his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle (whose name suggests Wodehouse learned a trick or two from Evelyn Waugh, for whom ...”

“... inhabitants of Marlow, for example, who were treated to the recurrent spectacle of a disgraceful young radical poet returning distractedly to his cottage after long scrambles in the woods. ‘He was the most interesting figure I ever saw,’ a child witness recalled later in life, still much struck. ‘His steps were often hurried, and sometimes he was ...”

“... Times for news of the Anschluss, I found a letter to the editor, dated 2 April 1938, from the Hon. Edward Stonor. Improbable as it sounds, he was hoping for some game shooting in Austria, and saw no reason for German field artillery to deflect his plan. ‘At Buchs, on the Swiss-Austrian frontier,’ he writes:We were invaded by six or seven very ...”

“... later years was signalled by their arrest and temporary imprisonment, in their brief triumph under Edward VI, and in the testing time of the Marian persecution. And perhaps they were only partially assimilated in the Elizabethan enjoyment of an established Protestant settlement, for it may have been essentially the ‘same’ people who were by then known to ...”

“... attempts to connect Thomas More’s defence of ecclesiastical interpretative prerogative to Edward Coke’s similar claims for legal expertise, without apparently being aware that More’s own concept of law was essentially transparent. In contrast to matters divine, More desired that secular law be written so as to ‘be read or understood by every one ...”

“... exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted to whatever commonplaces were popular when he was young. A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.’ This is poetry as catastrophe, as Minnesotan roulette. Heaney in his The ...”

“... in Madonna than in the multinationals. There was always, however, an alternative heritage. The young Marx owed much of his critique of capitalism to the aesthetics of Friedrich Schiller, and aesthetic notions lurk within the political and economic thought of his maturity. If the early Marx opposes industrial capitalism, it is as much because it robs us of ...”

“... the Rectal Brain: the Increments and Excrements of “Influence” in Dorian Gray and Edward II’ (this, incidentally, is what passes for Wildean wit at the MLA); ‘Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson’; or the terser, but sublimely opaque ‘Autophagy and the Logic of the Absolute Fragment’. These titles will ...”

“... and intellectual in politics’), and the anarchists make very incompatible bedfellows, while Edward Thompson was a born member of nature’s awkward squad. What they and Hitchens have in common is opposition. His Trotsky is the exiled prophet, not the victor of Kronstadt. All of them – Trotsky via political defeat – came to hate ...”

“... but by 1930 the increasingly unscrupulous High Command was sufficiently interested in the young man for him to be appointed professor of immunology at the Tokyo Army Medical School. He also gained the support of an eminent military scientist, Koizumi Chikahiko, who fancied himself as a humanist as well as a patriot. His slogan, Sheldon Harris tells ...”