“... likely to cave in, and not to walk towards the cluster of buildings a mile to the right, on King Edward Point, which was the British Garrison and a military secret. How many soldiers were stationed there? This was a military secret, too. ‘Very hush-hush,’ said the ruddy-faced curator solemnly.As far as I could see South Georgia is further away from ...”

“... fizzing with insects and furious hummingbirds, to hear Walcott speak with such affection about Edward Thomas and John Clare; odd to follow his gaze out to sea and hear him quote Walter de la Mare’s ‘Fare Well’ with its intimations of an English pastoral afterlife. When at the party Glyn Maxwell, or perhaps it was Paul Farley, asked him what it was to ...”

“... Stefan from late 1940, she describes an encounter with the ‘beautiful nonsensical drawings’ of Edward Lear. ‘I felt electrified,’ she writes, ‘like someone who can suddenly feel the ground alive under her feet again. I cried like a fool looking at those wonderful drawings.’ Now her own line thins as she finds her signature style in the Lear-like ...”

“... against the grain of his own transcendentalism. ‘I am a passionately religious man,’ he told Edward Garnett in April 1914, as he was completing ‘The Wedding Ring’, an early version of The Rainbow and Women in Love, ‘and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.’ But it remains at least possible that his religious ...”

“... be adroit at saving the appearances. At a dinner given when he was full of years and honours, C.P. Snow made a long speech referring to him as ‘a whisper of the conscience of England’. Priestley thanked the speakers in a few words and said he hoped they would now join him in walking upon the water. His sense of himself was romantic and naive but also ...”

“... was in fact a captured French privateer; and from this very modest height he sank to the Ranger, a snow that carried only eight little three-pounders and that harried smugglers off the Isle of Man. In 1776, having served his time as a midshipman, he passed his examination for lieutenant; but he was not of the usual commissioned officer material, or so the ...”

“... a cobbler who was converted after hearing Whitefield and became one of John Wesley’s preachers; Edward Caswall (‘Bethlehem of noblest cities’, ‘See, amid the winter’s snow’), the Tractarian clergyman who followed Newman to Rome; and How, the Bishop of Wake-field (‘It is a thing most wonderful’, ‘For all ...”

“... for Yeltsin and his family despite their colossal thefts of public money. Nobody is going to send Edward Shevardnadze to jail in Georgia, though some of his greedy relations may be less lucky. Yushchenko probably offered an immunity deal to get the outgoing president, Leonid Kuchma, out of his way; charges against him could range from gross ...”

“... their voices.Peter, now nine, went back to Gezira Preparatory School where, according to Edward Said, a fellow pupil, lessons were ‘mystifyingly English: we read about meadows, castles, and Kings John, Alfred and Canute with the reverence that our teachers kept reminding us they deserved.’ Equally baffling was the tradition of celebrating the ...”

“... robes held him down, cut open his chest, removed a black spot from his heart and washed it with snow from a golden bowl before sewing him back up; elsewhere in the text, however, they are not men but cranes, who emptied beakfuls of ice water into his chest. On occasion, negative stories slipped in, such as the notorious ‘Satanic Verses’ in al-Waqidi and ...”

“... he succeeded, ‘by climbing over hedges, walls, and fields’ which were still waist-deep in snow. A generation of historians have shown that Victorian science was deeply implicated in the Victorian state’s global and imperial projects, and Faraday’s involvement was not limited to the ancient perils of inshore navigation. From 1828, he served ...”

“... in the idea of life as a form of play and the writer as a kind of actor. At Cambridge, he and Edward Upward invented personae for themselves to inhabit, as well as a place, Mortmere, a sort of nursery habitation full of gothic fantasy, surreal antics and sexual innuendo. ‘Isherwood always found or invented someone or something to scrutinise and question ...”

“... collection Bread Out of Stone (1998), recalls bars, dancing all night, getting lost in hip-deep snow on the way to a party. ‘They were vibrant and hopeful days,’ she writes. ‘We argued, we debated, we came into the joy of being Black.’ She worked for the Black Education Project run by the Toronto Board of Education as well as for the Toronto ...”

“... past absorbed by Cartier-Bresson also comprised such giants of photography as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen – and look! here’s Stieglitz himself, whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in 1946, the lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another ...”