“... interests of free speech his critics should stop trying to sniff out moral wrongdoing. But when Edward Moxon pulled the book, Swinburne stood firm. ‘To alter my course or mutilate my published work seems to me somewhat like deserting one’s colours,’ he told Lord Lytton. ‘One may or may not repent having enlisted, but to lay down one’s arms, except ...”

“... Healey and Hugh Gaitskell were among the local Labour MPs who became friends, as did two Tories, Edward Boyle and Keith Joseph (who would phone Briggs in the middle of the night to talk about books). ‘At the time Asa considered himself a socialist and a supporter of the Bevanite wing of the Labour Party. But he was not active in politics and had allowed ...”

“... for example, that other lost play, The Fronny) reconstructed by the patient detective work of Edward Mendelson, repeatedly exemplify this association. The Enemies of a Bishop (1929), published here for the first time, ends with Robert Bicknell shooting his Spectre, a crime the village policeman greets with typical equanimity: Policeman: Ee’s ...”

“... What were you like as a child?’ Dick Cavett asked Edward Gorey on his talk show in November 1977. ‘Small,’ he replied. Gorey, who died in 2000 at the age of 75, did not like to talk about himself or his work, which depended, like the Japanese literature he admired, ‘very much [on] what is left out’. Someone who thought of himself principally as a writer, but is now remembered chiefly as an artist and illustrator of his own and other people’s work, Gorey created a peculiar, hermetic world in which the comic and the macabre combine in proportions dependent on the reader’s temperament ...”

“... was dubbed knight, he kissed his weapon. Sword responded to sword; swords were symbols. When Edward I’s judges asked Earl Warenne by what warrant he held his lands, the Earl brandished, not charters and legal records, but his ancestral sword, sign of his lineage and of his right to hold lands by the law of conquest. In his stimulating work on Medieval ...”

“... since his final bid for the South Pole. From 1913, when the news arrived of his death in the snow, until the late 1970s, Robert Falcon Scott’s reputation was frozen as the apotheosis of duty, Britishness and the selfless, good death. Then, just in time for the arrival of Margaret Thatcher’s brash, commercial vision of what ‘British’ was supposed ...”

“... Lincolnshire clergyman, a 19-year-old Harrovian and a Chamonix guide. They were the casualties of Edward Whymper’s successful assault on the Matterhorn in 1865, lost during the descent; a tragedy supposedly honoured by nature with an enormous fog-bow, incorporating two crosses. Whymper survived with two Swiss guides, father and son. The English chaplain of ...”

“... had been sponsored by the Observer, at that time peopled with fabled beings like Kenneth Tynan, Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee House in ...”

“... 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 King Solomon’s Mines the map instructions said the treasure-seeker should ‘climb the snow of Sheba’s left breast till he comes to the nipple, on the north side of which is the great road Solomon made’ (saucy stuff for those days). Haggard was shown at least two pairs of Sheba’s Breasts. He was also informed that the great Zimbabwe ruins had ...”

“... kinetically: silence .is a looking bird:the turn- ing;edge,of life (inquiry before snow Cummings here manipulates words and letters to achieve his effects, unsullied on this occasion by the use of the first person and the other mannerisms that took over early and hardened with time. One of his chief gifts is to atomise and reorganise ...”

“... on the left, especially defenders of the ‘Third World’ and its hopes, from C.L.R. James and Edward Said to Michael Gilsenan, more or less uniformly find him and his attitudes troubling and sometimes bigoted. He is portrayed as a self-hater and Uncle Tom, a product of the sorts of complex that Frantz Fanon diagnosed. On the other side are the ...”

“... change is and will be everywhere. It doesn’t stand apart from our daily existence, not any more. Edward Struzik’s Firestorm is about the coming age of ‘megafires’ – wildfires covering an area of 100,000 acres or more. The phenomenon isn’t new, but megafires now occur with unprecedented frequency, and are uprooting more and more people from their ...”

“... novel and fifth book; her first books had been biographies, of her father’s famous family and of Edward Burne-Jones. She was 62 when she won the Booker, a widow and the mother of three grown-up children, and although no longer in straits as desperate as those she had drawn on for the novel, she was accustomed to making do on very little. She lived on the ...”

“... likely to cave in, and not to walk towards the cluster of buildings a mile to the right, on King Edward Point, which was the British Garrison and a military secret. How many soldiers were stationed there? This was a military secret, too. ‘Very hush-hush,’ said the ruddy-faced curator solemnly.As far as I could see South Georgia is further away from ...”