“... There are two pieces about the Titanic, two about the Lusitania and two on the abdication of Edward VIII. Considering what MacArthur omits, repetitions are irritating. (There is also a repeated typo. You may wonder who Sylvia Pankhurt is. There are Pankhursts in my family and we tend to spell it with the ‘s’.) Obviously space is limited, and whether ...”

“... Union’s Gdansk congress: at least it made people sit up and think. He was a symbol of change – young, brash, apparently unstoppable. Apparently. There is evidence that Walesa himself saw the end coming. Why else did the Union’s national executive choose to hold its final meeting in the Lenin Shipyard – behind the gates? Why did Walesa tell the ...”

“... it must have been cooking for the British royal family (excepting the joyous interlude of Edward VII). All that would now change, no doubt, if William Rodgers and Prince Charles simultaneously arrived at supreme power: the one wrote for, the other confessedly followed, The Good Food Guide. Even gossip fragments like these are clues to the altered ...”

“... and his protégés, an early contributor to Poetry, Chicago) stayed behind; so did the group of young painters and photographers associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s quarterly Camera Work. Besides, it was always possible to import whole museum-loads of the right stuff – enough to fill the 69th Regiment Armory in New York in 1913 – in case the natives ...”

“... thus the index of intransigent and triumphant counter-revolution. Not surprisingly, a nucleus of young British post-structuralists have drifted towards Marxist activism or have addressed themselves to film rather than literature. Film narrative, given its corporate ownership and diffuse studio origins, has no obtrusive author to deal with. (The early Screen ...”

“... in his tense partnership with Conrad – and, in his late thirties, had much to offer the aspiring young. But neither the old guard nor les jeunes quite saw him as ‘the real right thing’. Conrad made use of him but never really thought that he belonged in the big league. James, if pressed, would have called him slapdash, unreliable, too vulgarly worried ...”

“... was born in 1872, the son of a professor of medicine in Gröningen. The young man studied Sanskrit, taking his doctorate in 1897, and his idiosyncratic path from there to the European Middle Ages shaped what he did when he arrived. Dutch history had only begun in earnest in the 16th century, so that Holland was late in producing ...”

“... was Archbishop of Armagh, a seat he resigned to another brother, Roland, who was confessor to Edward II of England – no doubt an interesting job to hold where gossip was concerned. And no wonder that JS’s son James not only owned a copy of the coat of arms, framed as a decoration, but had it stamped on the cover of a volume of his poems he had ...”

“... in Pomerania, he responded by saying that if it did, he would call the police. Enter the reformers Edward Cardwell and Hugh Childers, secretaries of state for war respectively in Gladstone’s first and second administrations (1868-74 and 1880-1885). Their ideas ran well beyond the improvement of the regular army itself, much though they achieved in that ...”

“... same time, many physicians over-reached themselves. Rival teams of doctors argued in court over Edward Davies’s manifest antipathy to his mother and whether it was delusional, one side claiming, as Suzuki has it, that she was ‘a nice mother, full of maternal love’, the other that Davies ‘had good reason to react angrily, implying that the mother was ...”

“... on 6 June 1894, the elder daughter of Alice Keppel, a famously discreet mistress of the future Edward VII. ‘I wonder if I shall ever squeeze as much romance into my life as she has had in hers,’ Violet wrote in the summer of 1918 to Vita Sackville-West. She had begun to squeeze a very indiscreet romance with Vita into her own life. The girls’ passion ...”

“... these tend to be men who once worked as juniors in his office, having been hand-picked at a very young age. Douglas Alexander became Brown’s researcher and speechwriter when he was in his early twenties. So did Ed Miliband. Ed Balls joined Brown when he was only 27, after a spell at the Financial Times, and they have been joined at the hip ever ...”

“... fervour; but the austere Harriet Martineau liked it too, as did General Gordon, Joseph Conrad and Edward VII. Its appeal spread far beyond British readers. R.K. Narayan dwells fondly on the ‘bitter tears’ he shed over East Lynne in his 1975 memoir, My Days: ‘Reading and rereading it always produced a lump in my throat, and that was the most luxurious ...”

“... the more inscrutable – ‘other’ – it remains. Post-colonial studies, beginning with Edward Said’s work in the 1970s on the exoticised and eroticised ‘Other’, acquired its initial impetus by naming and shaming this operation; its exposure has also been central to feminist and other anti-discriminatory ways of thinking. Although applications ...”

“... And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us ...”