“... but hard-eyed creature appeared, looked at him, gave a sort of laugh, and passed on. He felt, he said, “as if an icy hand had clutched at his heart”. He had a sudden presentiment. He saw a vision of folly, misery and ruin.’ The sex of this ‘creature’ remains unrecorded; Hesketh Pearson’s 1946 biography makes it a woman. Stanley Weintraub’s 1965 ...”

“... was remarkably resilient. He lived to be eighty, having served four monarchs (Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I) and spent 43 years as a member of the Chapel Royal. Unfortunately for historians, his music and his longevity are all we have to go on, since Tallis left almost nothing about himself. Unlike William Byrd and John Sheppard, he wrote ...”

“... panoramas, particularly when covering distant wars. The Foreign Office, steered by its librarian Edward Hertslet, began to see more importance in maps, while the War and India Offices and the Admiralty overhauled their intelligence departments in the 1870s and 1880s, impressed by the detailed maps used successfully by the Prussians to conquer France in ...”

“... in Pomerania, he responded by saying that if it did, he would call the police. Enter the reformers Edward Cardwell and Hugh Childers, secretaries of state for war respectively in Gladstone’s first and second administrations (1868-74 and 1880-1885). Their ideas ran well beyond the improvement of the regular army itself, much though they achieved in that ...”

“... Bar-Yosef’s persuasively argued study is to suggest that the influential model developed in Edward Said’s Orientalism won’t quite do as an explanation of popular English perceptions of the Holy Land. Said was steadily committed to the Palestinian cause, but the school of postcolonial criticism which he ...”

“... Protestants; Ruth and Jonah in Southern Swahili (spoken in the region of Zanzibar), translated by Edward Steere (1828-82), Zanzibar, 1868, and Saint Matthew by the same translator, London, 1869; Saint Matthew in Susu (spoken in French Guinea, West Africa), probably translated by J.H.A. Dupont (a West Indian of African descent, from Codrington ...”

“... on 6 June 1894, the elder daughter of Alice Keppel, a famously discreet mistress of the future Edward VII. ‘I wonder if I shall ever squeeze as much romance into my life as she has had in hers,’ Violet wrote in the summer of 1918 to Vita Sackville-West. She had begun to squeeze a very indiscreet romance with Vita into her own life. The girls’ passion ...”

“... on and following, in the wake of and on a level with the likes of James Buchan, Tessa Hadley and Edward St Aubyn. The four books are distinct – there’s no real overlap to speak of – but possess the sort of shared traits that a reader likes to find in an author, and an author in himself. London and the South-East is a story of a downwardly mobile and ...”

“... And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us ...”

“... late 14th-century politics. It was a confused world, trying to cope with the second childhood of Edward III and, with the Black Prince given a terminal prognosis, bracing itself for the first childhood of Richard II. It was embroiled in complex international relations, a collective if not effectively corporate regime dominated by ...”

“... lost in a Dali-plus-Ernst assemblage.) Writing a year later in the Architectural Review, Nash said that what had triggered the painting in the first place was a shattered elm in a field by the Severn, which had struck him as looking like the horse in Blake’s Pity (he slightly misquotes the lines Blake was drawing on from Macbeth – ‘sightless ...”

“... course of warming, some of which have proved surprisingly accurate. The Jamaican plantation owner Edward Long envisaged something not unlike the American Midwest of today – an agroindustrial ecotopia where the climate would be warmed by the ‘fires and smoke of ten thousand crowded cities hereafter to be built, and by a general subjection of the soil to ...”

“... be passed to him. One night he departed early and went to sleep in the cowshed as usual. What he said happened afterwards was hard to believe, even for people who lived in an age of daily miracles. He told the abbess that a mysterious figure had appeared in his dream and commanded him to sing of the creation of the world. Was it an angel or a demon? The ...”

“... Protect the NHS. Save Lives’ pinned to the front of his lectern.The message worked well (some said too well) and Johnson’s own satisfaction ratings rose sharply after he was admitted to hospital with Covid-19. In mid-April, two-thirds of respondents said they were confident the government would provide accurate ...”

“... increases as it gets a little closer to Brief Encounter. ‘I guess we’re both conceited,’ I said. ‘But you are brave.’ ‘No. But I hope to be.’ ‘We’re both brave,’ I said. ‘And I’m very brave when I’ve had a drink.’ ‘We’re splendid people,’ Catherine ...”