“... a mortal wound. Discussion of the end of the Cold War brought Halliday into collision with Edward Thompson, and their three-part dispute is reprinted here. Thompson reproached Halliday for describing the final arms-reduction process without mention of the Peace Movement as an influence on both superpowers, and went on to accuse him of a more general ...”

“... As well as a group of poets, the magazine also had some energetic and intelligent new critics: young hoods not afraid to wield an axe. It seemed to matter terribly that people didn’t get things wrong, that poetry – as we confidently understood it – didn’t get turned into something else: something flashier, more prosy, more glamorous, more ...”

“... thinker of 17th-century Ireland, Robert Boyle, to such 18th-century divines as William King, Edward Synge, Philip Skelton, Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift. Sterne, Joyce and Beckett classify the world compulsively, but only to make a mockery of the whole futile business. Walter Shandy, the obsessive rationalist of Sterne’s great novel, is clearly ...”

“... There are​ self-trained artists; then there are self-willed ones. Edward Burne-Jones, like Vincent Van Gogh, was one of the latter. That’s to say, he decided, in 1855, to be an artist – he was studying for a theology degree at Oxford at the time – without knowing whether he was capable of being one, perhaps even without considering absence of talent a potential obstacle ...”

“... Maude alongside consensual modernisers sceptical of market-based solutions like Iain Macleod and Edward Heath. The diversity has continued: later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various ...”

“... mujaddara, or Esau’s pottage.’ In 1933, Hourani went up to Oxford, to read PPE: ‘a very thin young man with luminous green eyes and a diaphanous complexion’, according to his friend Charles Issawi. After graduating, he worked for Chatham House and the Foreign Office, before becoming a fellow of Magdalen and subsequently director of the Middle East ...”

“... the scientists can help by making aesthetics a matter of knowledge rather than opinion. Well, if Edward Wilson’s Consilience is anything to go by, they can’t, and the same must be said of Ramachandran and Hirstein, who attempted, by experiments on rats, to divine the deep structure or universal rule underlying all aesthetic experience. Carey emphasises ...”

“... with which her thoughtless parents encumbered her at birth. King has her married to a ‘young man called James Monaco’ and this mistake is symptomatic of a certain vagueness in his approach to the subject, in that he never manages to elucidate all the myths which the lady’s posturings so insistently encouraged. Yet such an attack is ...”

“... we knew her much better than we really did. John Lehmann, writing of his early meetings with the young Stephen Spender, described Spender as ‘the most rapidly self-revealing person I had ever met’. Something of the sort might be said about Stevie: but one was simultaneously aware of a great deal that was not revealed, and never would be. The public ...”

“... Miss Gallagher, a prissy governess whom neither can stand, but who suffers unrequited passion for young Cathy. The children puzzle over the sudden and mystifying disappearance of their parents, a topic which must not be spoken of in public. There are clues picked up from village gossip, from the servants, from the mean-spirited and jealous Miss ...”

“... he becomes engrossed in electrical experiments and succeeds in turning his brother (‘Uncle Edward’) into the chime of the front-door bell. Other characters constantly appear and disappear, though in less radical fashion, throughout both books. They include the narrator’s ineffectual and inconsequential mother, the assistants in the store who are ...”

“... one stand up for the British national anthem? Should the theatre close to mourn the death of Edward VII? Yes, Gregory thought: after all, she said, her husband had been a personal friend of the King. Could one preserve the manners of one’s class and still work for Home Rule? Perhaps it was not really possible to do both without arousing suspicions of ...”

“... affluent commuters. The lecture includes a tribute to the Metropolitan’s great Victorian, Sir Edward Watkin, who dreamed of the company’s tracks forming part of a single line under a single management running from Manchester through London to Dover and then under the Channel to the Continent. It was Watkin’s men who began excavating a tunnel near ...”

“... launched in 1997): James Cook’s journal of the Endeavour, written in his own hand; and the Edward Koiki Mabo Papers, the record of Eddie Mabo’s landmark case before the High Court, which gave legal recognition to the fact that indigenous land ownership existed before European settlement and was not, in some cases, extinguished by the Crown. The ...”

“... in a sense Williams does too: her father, the political scientist and Labour intellectual George Edward Gordon Catlin (called Gordon), loved and admired his gifted daughter and cheered her every achievement. Yet, unlike Castle and Thatcher, who both adored their domineering fathers and thought their mothers doormats (a beloved doormat in Castle’s case, a ...”