“... welfare state of the Western European dispensation. ‘If modern Germany has a historic patron,’ Edward Pearce wrote recently, ‘it is not Marx, nor Bismarck, nor the Frederick the Great celebrated by East Germans’ –or at least by the party hacks who were dictating Kulturpolitik as relentlessly as the National Socialists had done – ‘but Walther ...”

“... The Horners of Mells commissioned from Munnings and Lutyens a large equestrian statue of their son Edward, but the villagers did not favour the idea of a young horseman riding up the aisle of the church and, finally, the statue was squeezed into the family’s private chapel. It is a pity, perhaps, that so much attention is ...”

“... obtained the money which underpins his political career by disclosing a government secret when a young private secretary; and Mrs Cheveley tells Sir Robert that she will be in the gallery with his incriminating letter to ensure that he commends the rascally Argentine canal scheme to the House. In one way, that may not have been a thousand miles from the ...”

“... anthology. There are a number of poems, by Suckling, Henry King, George Farewell, Andrew Young, which will probably be new to the reader, and which will certainly produce ‘the illusion that it was written specially for me’. There are well-known favourites too, like Housman’s ‘Bredon Hill’ and Flecker’s ‘Golden Journey’. Interesting ...”

“... 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 ...”