“... genius to be in everything else while being in nothing himself. Historically, the English could be said to have been good at that. An Englishman who goes to Ireland is apt to become an Irishman overnight, but the same does not happen in reverse. Many, if not most Englishmen can and do claim to be partly Irish or Scottish or Welsh, but the claim is seldom made ...”

“... went up to post-Newmanite Oxford to encounter Ruskin and (in the form of his lifelong colleague Edward Burne-Jones) Pre-Raphaelitism. After Oxford, he and his friends set up an arts and crafts workshop in Red Lion Square and helped to paint the Arthurian murals in the Oxford Union, while Morris himself unleashed an unstaunchable stream of poetry. He then ...”

“... continued to put themselves in the hands of Indian practitioners when in direst need. This, said one doctor, ‘can only throw undeserved discredit on our profession and serve to foster native prejudice against us’. As the British became more enamoured of their status as a ruling race, physical and intellectual contact with Indians had to be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... There are two pieces about the Titanic, two about the Lusitania and two on the abdication of Edward VIII. Considering what MacArthur omits, repetitions are irritating. (There is also a repeated typo. You may wonder who Sylvia Pankhurt is. There are Pankhursts in my family and we tend to spell it with the ‘s’.) Obviously space is limited, and whether ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Nato and supposedly a favoured pastime of its namesake. He wasn’t as agitated as Ingraham but he said that if 84 per cent of Iowan Democrats under the age of thirty were supporting a self-declared socialist it was a sign that American high schools weren’t teaching economics properly. In northern Connecticut, Rush Limbaugh occupied multiple frequencies on ...”

“... and fight. ‘I broke a bloke’s jaw once,’ he writes, because he ‘spilled my beer and never said sorry’. Brian remembers him coming home from the pub plastered: ‘There’d be trouble if his dinner wasn’t on the table. Or, if the fire wasn’t to his liking he’d smash up the furniture and burn it.’ Bob’s father once carried a dead pig up to ...”

“... ultimately was) – is perhaps the first to engage properly with its provisions. He reveals that Edward Carson, the Dublin-born lawyer who led the unionist opposition to Home Rule, was a strong supporter of the body and ‘optimistic enough to hope [that it contained] the germ of a united Ireland in [the] future’. Similarly, Townshend’s exploration of ...”

“... part of his aesthetic if not devotional landscape. ‘How delightful the Capala shrine is!’ he said during his terminal illness – an expression of pleasure of a kind which the scribes setting down the otherwise austere transmission, hundreds of years after his death, perhaps heard too little of. The Amaravati stupa, like other ruined shrines, combined ...”

“... straight from his sloping forehead: galb-like wings to his nostrils – the goat-like profile of Edward the Peacemaker. The lips were curved. They were thickly profiled as though belonging to a moslem portrait of a stark-lipped sultan. His eyes, vacillating and easily discomforted, slanted down to the heavy curved nose. Eyes, nose and lips contributed to one ...”