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“... almost wielding) a blood-stained axe. The killer, an old schoolfriend of Cobb’s called Edward, is that rare item in the archives of murder, a matricide; he has just been released after 13 years in Dublin’s Dundrum Asylum (a fitting name, by the sound of it, for a place where life is dun and humdrum). Even better, the friend begins by blaming the ...”

“... These two paperbacks, of Geoffroi de Charny’s A Knight’s Own Book of Chivalry and Edward, Duke of York’s The Master of Game, make accessible two texts that are of exceptional interest for the light they shed on the ethos, style and tastes of the secular aristocracy of the later Middle Ages. Charny’s book offers an exploration and explanation of the values and proper manner of life for Christian knights and men at arms by someone who was a knight himself ...”

“... Ages. Since everything began in 1066, the Hammer of the Scots can occupy all history books as ‘Edward the First’, his namesakes the Confessor and the Elder literally felt not to count – even though the latter’s mark may still be visible on the shire system of Central England. As for the Egberts and Oswigs and Cerdics, the incompetences of modern ...”

“... They lived for a time in adjacent lodgings. For a week they subsisted on cheese and apples, till Edward, the older man, unexpectedly got a cheque for £25. They had a good meal in a Soho restaurant, crossed the street and sat down to another. Half a bottle of wine could then be had for tenpence. They went on to port in a friend’s room. When they got back ...”

“... which read into Harry’s serviceable Swedish surname (minus its umlaut), the angst upon which young academics new to the scholarly meadow delight to nibble. But there is a passage late in the present volume where Harry, to please his granddaughter Judy and her guide troop, dresses for the Fourth of July parade in the full costume of Uncle Sam, with ...”

“... A special 25th anniversary edition of Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Consensus was published in March. Harvard University Press are advertising it together with Richard Lewontin’s new book, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, Environment, presumably to let everyone know they’re not taking sides. Lewontin and Wilson, fiercely opposed to each other intellectually, used to have labs one directly above the other at Harvard (and weren’t on speaking terms) – an arrangement curiously reproduced in the design of the new ad ...”

“... couple, who did so much to uphold decent family values in the rackety era of the Bright Young Things. Think of George VI, Elizabeth and the two young princesses, ‘we four’, as the King observed with characteristic precision, ‘the royal family.’ And think of Elizabeth and Philip, whose domestic felicity was ...”

“... In​ the middle of February 1348, King Edward III held a royal tournament in Reading. He probably held another one that month in Bury St Edmunds. He held another on 20 April in Lincoln, and three more in May, in Lichfield, Windsor and Eltham. He liked a tournament. His victory over France at Crécy two years earlier and England’s seizure of Calais were still fresh memories for him and the aristocratic chums who’d fought beside him ...”

“... has been among its most assured traditions, and it may have been Lively’s numerous books for young readers that first led her to brood on what we need to learn from families, and how that learning can go wrong. The most robust character in her patient new novel, Passing on, is a mother who is not there. Dorothy Glover, a woman of formidable ...”

“... was becoming increasingly irritated by her continued seclusion at Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral, a young, clever, radical MP named George Otto Trevelyan published a pamphlet which had the effrontery to ask: ‘What does she do with it?’ Where, Trevelyan wanted to know, was all the money going which the Queen was paid by the Government for the sole purpose of ...”

“... Edward Thomas​ believed that up to about the age of four what he called ‘a sweet darkness’ enfolded him ‘with a faint blessing’. It was, though, a darkness and the blessing was faint. ‘From an early age’, Jean Moorcroft Wilson writes, Thomas ‘felt cursed by a self-consciousness he believed the chief cause of his later problems and depression ...”

“... Most striking, and something confirmed on the day of the funeral, were the large numbers of young couples, with as many men as women holding flowers. The queues of those waiting to sign the books of condolence increased throughout the week until Friday, when 43 books became available. On Thursday the sign said ‘waiting time 7 hours,’ but the police ...”

“... is shown by Vogt in passages like the following, written by Wagner in 1851, while at work on ‘Young Siegfried’, the germ from which The Ring of the Nibelung gradually emerged:My daily routine is now as follows, 1st, half-past-five in the morning wet pack until 7 o’clock; then a cold bath and a walk. 8 o’clock breakfast: dry bread and milk or ...”

“... with unequivocal authority on this question, then we have to believe in her words that ‘that young man was as much in love with Miss Talbert as Thackeray makes Pendennis in love with the actress, and poor Peggy was confronted with a hard fact.’ The chapter, in the first person and thus in James’s words subject to ‘the terrible fluidity of ...”

“... and the largest point of entry for cocaine, which was becoming the drug of choice for bright young things and many others with steady middle-class salaries, in contrast to the miserable incomes of most heroin buyers. With the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellites, cocaine markets expanded greatly, further increasing the traffic from Gioia ...”