“... it took place ‘was two storeys high with round arched windows down the east side and an Inigo Jones ceiling’, she quotes, entirely verbatim, substantial parts of the marriage service, the best-known parts, including ‘I will.’ There can be few of her readers who are not familiar in some capacity with a traditional Anglican church wedding or have not ...”

“... who took her provincial style in hand and then left her, to Oxford, to Aldermaston, and via Edward and Dorothy Thompson, to the watering hole of the New Left at the Partisan in Carlisle Street in Soho. It’s a fair geography of the early 1960s. People had begun wandering about, and unless you stayed put, you were bound to meet them. They were delighted ...”

“... some to friends, including Monckton Milnes, Richard Burton and D.G. Rossetti. Ruskin and Burne-Jones discovered it; Meredith was bowled over by it. By the century’s end it had already gone through hundreds of editions. In his ABC of Reading Ezra Pound proposed the critical exercise: try to find out why the Rubaiyat has been so successful. Not so ...”

“... Crowson), made when he read Baldwin’s skilful statement to the Commons on the abdication of Edward VIII: ‘He is a veritable Bagstock of a fellow – “deep, deep and devilish sly, is tough old Joe, sir.”’ But tough old Stan was only doing what a politician, or indeed anyone else at large in the world, has to do. Posing is a necessary part of ...”

“... was not limited to the ancient perils of inshore navigation. From 1828, he served alongside Edward Sabine on the Admiralty’s resident scientific committee, and in the next few decades became a minor player in Sabine’s ‘magnetic crusade’ – an international attempt to theorise the Earth’s magnetic field and, in doing so, devise practical ...”

“... back into the closet for a further half-century. The issue of divorce forced the abdication of Edward VIII, as it had once wrecked the movement for Irish Home Rule. Teenage unmarried mothers could be locked away for years, problem children from the slums could be shipped out to the Dominions without redress, ‘mental defectives’ (a new coinage) were ...”

“... into being ‘after native men and women were kicked out of their homes to make way for one of Edward I’s imposing ring of castles’. It may have happened seven hundred years ago, but it still grates. Today the English come to Wales not with weapons but with bank balances that enable them to buy second homes. And there is still resistance. Between 1979 ...”

“... anything to do with the Nazis was as damaging to the nation’s soul as anything alleged against Edward VIII. Wodehouse had been an emblem of Britishness for the smug, Daily Telegraph elements in the United Kingdom: his work was ‘the sort of thing foreigners don’t understand’ – like cricket, Gilbert and Sullivan. Malcolm Muggeridge has told an ...”

“... habit of practical philanthropy which was both a virtue and an indulgence for someone who found Edward Carpenter’s ‘ideal of comradeship among simple honest ordinary lives’ so attractive. He left Cambridge and began to lecture and teach. He was inspired, as Crawford puts it, by ‘a mixture of angry youthful idealism and of upper-class notions of duty ...”

“... expect very little from books with titles like The Fortunate Traveller (Derek Walcott), Sun Poem (Edward Kamau Brathwaite), Aegean Islands (Bernard Spencer) and Sun the First (Odysseus Elytis). Walcott confronts this prejudice in his new volume. Dividing his poems into those set in exile in the ‘North’ (the United States and Britain) and those of the ...”

“... drinking, and periodically subject to extreme physical abuse, the Marlowe of the novels, unlike Edward G. Robinson’s insurance investigator in Double Indemnity, is trapped in the dark underside of American life and never acquires the insurance man’s protective armour, his forceful, single-minded menace. But whereas in Woman in the Window Lang directed ...”

“... first the Pre-Raphaelites were able to rouse both anger and admiration; a Soho sex shop with Burne-Jones posters as its sole window decoration suggests that whatever it was about their work that made people uneasy still tells. Pre-Raphaelite pictures can be memorable even when they are unlikeable: indeed, are sometimes most memorable when most ...”

“... early films, from Red River to Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953), and then, after Edward Dmytryk’s Raintree County (1957), eight late films from Vincent Donehue’s Lonelyhearts (1958) to Raoul Lévy’s The Defector (1966), the caesura provided by the spectacular car crash that wrecked his face. There are three kinds of classic American ...”

“... themselves imprisoned and then fined. A trial of the last jury member to refuse to pay the fine, Edward Bushel, established that juries did have the right to acquit according to conscience and could not be punished for doing so. There is a plaque to commemorate the trial at the Old Bailey.The Labour government is using the Terrorism Act 2000 to prevent ...”

“... It made me realise that it was not coincidental that public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Edward Said held professorships at universities, which must be the last sanctuaries for freedom of speech.’ He decides to apply. Of course Danlin is only a hopeful outsider, entitled to his idealism. Jin himself must know a little more about the realities of ...”