“... 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 ...”

“... love of fools and foolishness, that she turned back to them. It is the same with the absurd Sir Edward, who ‘knew his business’ when it came to seduction, and who thinks that Timbuktu would be an ideal venue for the rape of Clara Brereton, although his indigence ‘obliged him to prefer the quietest sort of ruin for the object of his affections’. The ...”

“... Edward Jones – the Burne came later – was born in Birmingham to a mother who died giving birth to him and a father who eked out a living as a frame-maker, although art, his son reported, ‘was always a great bewilderment to him’. The only person who seems to have recognised the boy’s talent – a neighbour who bought pictures to rework – had the dubious merit of having once painted stormy waves over a calm harbour scene by Turner ...”

“... may be legally poured out, dissected and analysed, with effects on the owner to be determined. Edward Snowden made these discoveries, among others, while working as an analyst for the CIA, the NSA and the security outfit Booz Allen Hamilton (whose present vice chairman, Mike McConnell, is a former director of the NSA). Imperialism has been defined as doing ...”

“... Mumford & Sons, the Americana string band Old Crow Medicine Show and alt-rock hipsters Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros as they travelled together by train from Oakland in California, ending up in New Orleans with an inevitable hootenanny-style rendition of ‘This Train Is Bound for Glory’. The song is actually an old gospel ...”

“... Chaucer served under three kings, honing his diplomatic skills in the last decades of Edward III, surviving the tumultuous reign of Richard II (1377-99), and gaining the favour of Henry IV before what must have been a rather sudden death in 1400. To contextualise his career, Turner provides an extensive political, social, economic and cultural ...”

“... best poem on TIME’. The best poem not about time might have been more of a challenge, but the young Beckett, for once letting optimism get the better of him, entered with a hastily written 98-line poem, dropped off at Cunard’s office on the competition’s last day. In a letter to Cunard from 1959, Beckett recalls that he ‘wrote first half before ...”

“... in every window in Madrid. ‘The voyage of the Knights of adventure’, as the secretary of state Edward Conway called it, finally seemed to be taking off. Buckingham recorded that Charles was in love: ‘Baby Charles is so touched by the heart that he confessed that all he ever saw is nothing to her.’ Poor Charles was not to get the girl. The infanta ...”

“... it seems to make superfluous the whole later development of the cheesecake genre. A shamefaced young woman looks quizzically at the photographer while fending off a half-tumescent man who simultaneously kisses her and displays her genitals to the camera (in today’s convention, a more dishonest one, she displays them herself). How appropriate, one ...”

“... He first became aware of this paradox, he says, when reading an 18th-century popular song, about a young man who, while staying at an inn, overhears his mistress and her maid in the room next door, where they are sharing a bed and arguing who shall be first to use the chamber-pot. There is no doubt that what Mason is here grasping by a corner is a topic of ...”

“... the normal pattern of a successful career. It may be that this preferment was connected with the young Henry III, who was released from the control of his guardians in the early 1220s, and whom Grosseteste may have served as secretary and keeper of his secret seal. With his new independence, Grosseteste went to Oxford, where he was from about 1225 to ...”

“... produce, For thro’ thy pocket oozed the viscous juice.                   Edward I scorn a tell-tale, or I cou’d declare How, leave unask’d, you sought the neighbouring fair; Then home by moon-light spurred your jaded steed, And scarce returned before the hour of bed. Think how thy trembling heart had felt affright, Had not our ...”

“... despair, and die!’ The ghosts are those of the people we know as the Duke of Clarence, Prince Edward, Queen Anne and others. The movie is Richard III, although the man in the novel doesn’t know this, since he has caught only part of the film on television, and the time is the eve of the battle of Bosworth Field. The toy planes and the movie run through ...”

“... whale lives by getting between the harpoon and the whale. Lamb’s book instead has pictures of young people holding up placards saying ‘Who Needs Sperm Oil?’; of a bus with a David Bowie poster on the front because FoE persuaded Ziggy Stardust himself to dedicate a performance to Save the Whale. FoE also took out quarter-page adverts in the ...”

“... what to do with the caped crusader. Eden, the Foreign Secretary, paid him a private visit, but Edward VIII refused to invite him to Buckingham Palace, and when the former Emperor lunched at the House of Commons, Baldwin hid behind a table to avoid meeting him. As the Conquering Lion of Judah began several miserable years of exile in Worthing, Steer, along ...”