“... for a seductress. Two of her skins were the gifts of Imperial statesmen who perhaps should have said it with flowers. ‘Preposterous’ is the word one tries not to apply to Elinor Glyn. Red-haired, green-eyed, intense, snobbish, spendthrift, a devilish fine woman in a tableau vivant, the tease of kings and proconsuls, an unstoppable redecorator, a ...”

“... faulty. I recall an almost unbelievable evening’s talk in the mid-Seventies with the late Sir Edward Youde when he was Ambassador in Beijing, in the course of which he seemed to be trying to persuade me that Deng was really a closet liberal in the broadest sense of that word. I thought for an hour or so this was just a diplomat’s game, to test my ...”

“... in the last fortieth of a second. ‘We are surrounded by people,’ Brower is supposed to have said, ‘who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal but they are stark, raving mad.’ Brower was a formidable operator and his congregation already knew the theology: they just ...”

“... meeting he looked old and ungainly, but his power & eloquence as a speaker were homeric. But I said at the time that but for his speaking he was in appearance like a cross between a fiend and a tallow chandler. Rossetti, whose friendship is the one most rewardingly described, is also best shown at his worst, or most exasperating. He stayed with the Browns ...”

“... primrose that forsaken dies’) which Frieda found touching and ‘lovable’, while even Lawrence said ‘it wasn’t bad’. This ‘faded photograph’, as Frieda also called it, which was never published and which Jessie later destroyed, made Frieda intuit even more forcibly the ‘amazing brutality’ of Lawrence’s own novel, then still at the foetal ...”

“... deplores ‘Mood’s technical shortcomings and his inability to profit from the kindly advice of Edward Garnett (affectionately recalled in another piece), but finally puts its unfinishableness down to the death of the girl who had inspired it. There’s certainly something uneasy about its tone from the start: ‘Constance was utterly charming. This book is ...”

“... your mouth, you don’t know where they’ve been.’ Mostly the tone has the dear grouchiness of Edward FitzGerald, another master of lugubrious comedy and of critical aperçus that weigh more than other men’s tomes. Like Larkin a chastening defender of poets against their own incipient inauthenticities, FitzGerald used to groan to good effect. Tennyson ...”

“... to join the Royal Navy (his mother intervened), and he named the family plantation after Admiral Edward Vernon, the hero of Porto Bello. But Washington had had long experience of that combination of arrogance and condescension which defined British policy towards the mainland colonies in the two decades before the Declaration of Independence. When the ...”

“... of meeting him again. He owed thousands of dollars to dozens of people in several counties. He was said to have carried a KKK card and was widely known as a vocal racist. At his last job before being assigned to the drug task-force that conducted the Tulia busts, Coleman was caught stealing gasoline: he was actually arrested for this while working undercover ...”

“... Reeve wryly remarked 17 years ago) only under ideal conditions unlikely ever to be fulfilled. That said, Reeve’s new text, a collation of 11 of the most important manuscripts, is probably the best we’ve had since Geoffrey put his pen down, and it makes much previous scholarship redundant. Michael Faletra’s student translation, for instance, useful and ...”

“... a textiles magnate who became the principal shareholder in Imperial Chemicals Industries – was said to be the wealthiest man in Lancashire, but the family was uneasy about its status, and his wife, Maurie, complained that she was snubbed by the local gentry. They were Catholic too, which may have been part of it. Both parents seem to have viewed their ...”

“... British publisher cared to risk it. In the words of one of the best editors of the time, Edward Garnett, it contained ugly words, ugly things, would be considered a little sordid; he did have words of praise for it but thought the whole thing needed to be rewritten.) That was 1916. I am further taken aback to find that I did not get around to it for ...”

“... a more scorching erasure. Discrediting, and if possible disavowing, the prime ministership of Edward Heath was one of the earliest tasks of the Thatcherite project. It was what gave coherence to an otherwise confused and erratic new leadership. The leader knew what she detested long before she knew what she liked, and her own part in the Heathite reign of ...”

“... the British and their Free French allies. Churchill’s man with de Gaulle was Major General Edward Louis Spears, half-English, half-Irish by birth, French by upbringing and education, a career British cavalryman whose two languages (he had also qualified as an Army Interpreter in German), courage (four times wounded) and temperament had made him a name ...”

“... He speaks of the Cambridge which educated him as still unchangingly complacent, and he might have said, too, that Cambridge is unchangingly combative, a state of mind only superficially at odds with complacency. Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam saw such prickliness in a Cambridge friend of theirs: It is Tennant’s misfortune that with a soul yearning for ...”