“... This was not romantic. At Florence they met the Countess of Albany, widow of Prince Charles Edward, and Count Alfieri, ‘the Shakespeare of Italy’. In Naples they were welcomed in the highest circles and Katherine found much material for her mocking pen: the royal family ‘cramming like dragons’, the Prince dancing ‘like a cow cantering’, the ...”

“... the longed-for past almost certainly didn’t feel as wonderful at the time as it does in memory. Edward Manners, aesthete and voyeur, the splendidly creepy narrator of Hollinghurst’s second novel, The Folding Star (1994), is infatuated with his 17-year-old pupil, in love largely with the memory of being 17 himself. The Swimming Pool Library is elegiac not ...”

“... Edward​ Long arrived ‘home’ in the ‘mother country’ in 1769 with his wife and three young children after 12 years as a planter in Jamaica. His return presented no problems. He was a colonist, a ‘freeborn Englishman’, welcomed back to ‘his’ country. His wife came, as he did, from an elite white dynasty and his children, though they were born in Jamaica, inherited his birthright ...”

“... Edward Said​ was no tree-hugger. Descended from traders, artisans and professionals, he once described himself as ‘an extreme case of an urban Palestinian whose relationship to the land is basically metaphorical’.* In After the Last Sky, his meditation on the photographs of Jean Mohr, he explored the most intimate aspects of Palestinian lives, from hospitality to sports to home décor ...”

“... by fewer than a dozen people who turned a mass political organisation into a vehicle for the Blair/Brown project of market-friendly modernisation. The breakdown of Blair’s relationship with Brown ensured that the transition would not be without friction, but the resulting conflicts were personal rivalries played out within ...”

“... Colby’s best efforts, a worthy attempt to revive interest in work which nobody other than Edward Casaubon or a masochist could be impatient to read is another, infinitely more fascinating book. This tells Lee’s personal story and, in particular, the story of her complicated relationship with Eugene. Sexually and emotionally, the siblings were, to ...”

“... means to escape poverty. Hopeless rage smoulders throughout these communications. In 1797, William Brown of Benton, Northumberland was sent a menacing letter from somebody claiming to be a former servant, ‘turned away for no reason’, asking that £20 be left under a stone in Tynemouth: ‘me famalry are now starving the Butchers will let them have no more ...”

“... the catalogue commentary requires the combined efforts of Colin Amery, Mary Lutyens, Jane Brown, John Cornforth, Gavin Stamp and John Summerson to do justice to an architect whose career, in its range, dimensions and achievements, outshines Wren, Vanbrugh and the Adam brothers. Cloud-capp’d towers, gorgeous palaces, solemn temples: Lutyens made them ...”

“... that was at the knee. Vast savings in labour and material could no doubt have been made if Captain Edward Molyneux or Captain Hardy Amies had come up with the mini-skirt, but there was trouble enough on the Home Front without pandering to what Hazlitt, contemplating Regency fashions, called ‘the greedy eye and rash hand of licentiousness’. The Germans had ...”

“... result (largely written by McGovern’s speechwriter, Robert Schrum, who later went to work for Edward Kennedy) was at least as good as the speech made by President Carter in 1980, even though Carter’s chief speechwriter and other aides spent over two months preparing two series of drafts, an ‘A’ series for Jimmy and Rosalynn and a ‘B’ series for ...”

“... Party. And there is worse to come. Carrington was not only a close friend and associate of Edward Heath (whose name remains at the top of Mrs Thatcher’s list of hates, the next two being Arthur Scargill and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing), but also exemplified the style and attitudes of the Foreign Office (insouciance and intelligence). The Foreign ...”

“... starts: He’s timid with women, and the dusk is excruciating The bronze-brown autumn dusk! And the half-lit territories of street and bed and heart Are savage and full of risk. On bronze nights When the territory is half-lit by casual glances He sweats, each step is hideous! Once he knows his strength of course he will be ...”

“... by all the males of my family), were clogged with Christian tourists, carrying dreadful little brown crosses in their hands with a look of rapt vacancy, wandering everywhere, oblivious to the 20th-century conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. As the Holy Land’s nerve centre, and the likeliest source of future unrest, Jerusalem has never been ...”

“... Voted off the NEC in 1993, he could only watch as first John Smith and then Blair and Gordon Brown modernised the Party. That they did so from Millbank Tower, built on the site of the house in which Benn was born, added pathos to the triumph of New Labour over old. The fate of the Bennite Left under New Labour underlines the point: stalwarts from the ...”

“... no less, entitled A Guest of Honour. Even today, it has the air of a massive cultural oxymoron. Edward Berlin speculates that the libretto may celebrate Theodore Roosevelt’s politically dangerous invitation to a black man – the celebrated educationalist, Booker T. Washington – to dine at the White House. Styled a ‘ragtime opera’, A Guest of Honour ...”