“... scarce (in 1942, according to a survey, many children did not believe that bananas were real): Edmund’s Turkish Delight stands in for every lost and longed-for glory. What child forgets the seismically disappointing discovery that the English version tastes like jellied flowers dusted in soap powder?What else did I long for as a child? I wanted action. I ...”

“... make good. One of the leading historians of early American history during the last half-century, Edmund Morgan has, like Franklin, demonstrated great range, oblivious to the habit of specialisation and the accompanying turf wars that claim so many academic casualties. He has written biographies of John Winthrop, Ezra Stiles, Roger Williams and George ...”

“... 1000 ad, looking back to the glories of King Edgar’s day. After the Spithead Mutiny of 1797, Edmund Burke moaned: ‘Our only hope is a submission to the enemy … as to our navy, that has already perished with its discipline for ever.’ Only eight years later came Trafalgar, the most thumping victory ever at sea. The movement from neglect and ...”

“... during his composition of the six drafts) was rapidly if not instantaneously identical with Edmund Burke’s, even before he read the latter’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, which he was anxious to have sent him in Lausanne when he heard it was in preparation. The two men were not specially close; Gibbon had been a Lord North Whig when ...”

“... is spilt religion, which, as in late 19th-century England, finds peculiar outlets. In one fable Edmund Ignatius MacHugh frenetically founds cults and dispatches newsletters: the Field Day Anthology is a long newsletter from a section of the Irish intelligentsia.The conflict in, and about, Northern Ireland has renewed a struggle for cultural hegemony that ...”

“... Europeans: splendid, dear Britons, your debates have not been so interesting to us since Edmund Burke dissected the French Revolution’ (Gustav Seibt, Süddeutsche Zeitung). ‘The fact that the German European “discourse” assumes as a matter of course that the end of European unification will be the end not only of the German ...”

“... canon, including James Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana and the Memoirs of the regicide Edmund Ludlow. It wasn’t that Whig Presbyterians were against monarchy; rather, they argued that popular consent was the only acceptable basis for kingly government. The Presbyterianism of the upwardly mobile Stewarts was considerably diluted over the course of ...”

“... of biological discovery, does not rank in glamour with the exploits of Captain Scott and Sir Edmund Hillary. Hydrozoa are commonly known as jellyfish, and Huxley seems to have devoted a lot of time in the 1840s to examining the interior workings of tapeworms (cestodes, or endoparasitic platyelmia). Hard to make a bestseller out of that. More ...”

“... well represented by writers who weren’t New York intellectuals at all. We could think of Kenneth Burke, R.P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, many more. But Mrs Trilling’s point is important. What hides in the phrase ‘general culture’ is the belief that literature and culture and politics are connected, that controversy is good and bad for the mind and ...”

“... and to the words describing them.’ Hazlitt has this double relish in mind when he discusses Burke, whose ‘execution, like that of all good prose, savours of the texture of what he describes, and his pen glides or drags over the ground of his subject, like the painter’s pencil’. This commentary has a gusto of its own: description is rendered ...”

“... concerned with the economic impact of slavery, don’t live up to Stowe’s comments, though Edmund Wilson, in Patriotic Gore, was too harsh in claiming that ‘Olmsted, in the literary sense, was a very bad writer.’ But he certainly wrote better about things like trees, rocks and streams than he did about economics. In the late summer of 1857 Olmsted ...”

“... charm that fascinated Henry James and all those other competent Late Victorians (Sidney Colvin, Edmund Gosse, Charles Baxter) who worried interminably about the great question, ‘what to do with Louis?’ Perhaps they need not have worried. ‘Thin legged! thin-chested!’ Louis revealed considerable ability to look after himself and boss others in his ...”

“... Barzun, R.P. Blackmur, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Robert Fitzgerald, Leslie Fiedler and John Crowe Ransom – this last its founder as a school of literary criticism ‘to teach those who teach it’. Marianne Moore, in Brooklyn, had a quieter time, but was just as much in touch with them all through ...”

“... Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Melville, Thomas Hardy and the author of Ecclesiastes are also members. Edmund Blunden thought The City of Dreadful Night a great anticipation of The Waste Land. If Pope’s Dunciad, Johnson’s ‘London’, Blake’s Songs of Experience and Shelley’s ‘Peter Bell’ are set before it. Thomson takes his place in a tradition ...”

“... himself. There are times when his tirades against his East India Company employers bring to mind Edmund Burke’s later, rather more eloquent assaults on the same institution, which also take a smack at the sexual crimes of the colonialists. Rather as Burke was both Irish outsider and champion of English tradition, so ...”