“... regarded the battle as a psychological turning point in Scotland’s history. Flodden, it’s said, undermined the confidence of the country’s rulers and governing classes in the ability of their small realm to play a role in Europe, most obviously as a counterweight to England. James IV is seen as having been forced into invasion and battle by the ...”

“... career was concerned (he took up the first of a series of distinguished chairs, the John Edward Taylor Professorship of English at Manchester, the following year), and a book of that sort was more widely reviewed in those days than it would be now. But was the publication of that short book, largely about the Romantic roots of modernist poetry and ...”

“... of letter-writers: as well as extraordinary correspondents like Alexander von Humboldt, who is said to have written more than fifty thousand letters in his long life, millions of ordinary individuals could now send one another messages easily and economically. The British postal service delivered 564 million letters in 1860 and 2.3 billion in 1900. And ...”

“... sources corroborate Procopius’ account: even Theodora’s fellow Miaphysite John of Ephesus said that she came ‘from the brothel’ (porneion), and Potter’s argument that the word could have referred simply to her past as an actress is too generous. There are other things Procopius could not possibly have known, and some he simply made up, though he ...”

“... wont to wear every day’. The wording suggests that the clerk stayed close to what Bayly actually said, showing a respect for her precise wishes. Joan Kent, who had outlived three husbands when she made her will in 1487, gave her son John his father’s silver girdle and a gilt cup that had belonged to his godmother. She warned him to be ‘therewith ...”

“... communication tunnels) as the tunnel which was promoted in the late 19th century by Edward Watkin of the Southeastern Railway Company and his partner and engineer, William Low. Despite the success of the great Alpine tunnels – Saint-Gotthard, Simplon, Mont Cenis – it is doubtful that Watkin and Low could have succeeded with their project of ...”

“... refugee; Stravinsky debonair in double-breasted suit photographed in Los Angeles by his friend Edward G. Robinson; a merry Stravinsky at a recording session (of The Rake’s Progress), one hand holding a cigarette, the other in conjunction with a whisky bottle. The implacability of the man stays stamped on his photographed features till the end ...”

“... the ideal of the pure ‘Yale Box’, and in that measure they get kid-glove treatment too. Thus Edward Durell Stone, designer of the pretty little Huntington Hartford Museum and the lacery-tracery US Embassy for New Delhi, is excused exactly the kind of sneering heaped on Wolfe’s villains. With unbelievable innocence (or dissimulation?), he attributes the ...”

“... somehow he never got much of it onto paper. When he finished composing his first poem at 20, he said: ‘Well, if this is poetry, it is very easy to write.’ It cost him little in effort or emotion; when he read aloud from his Earthly Paradise, Georgie Burne-Jones, who listened to him out of love, had to bite her fingers or stick herself with pins to stay ...”

“... about Hugh Kenner and commented: ‘This precipitates not Ooh but Ah.’ Let us indulge the King Edward Professor for a moment. Supposing critical judgments – and judgments about judgments – may be reduced to a series of sounds like ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’, what ‘direct’ and ‘personal’ vocal reaction is precipitated by Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his ...”

“... we insist on its ‘proper disposal’. Hohn’s ideas are more or less in tune with those of Edward Abbey: in his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, a Vietnam vet called Hayduke wages guerrilla war on landscape-blighting public works projects but defiantly drops litter along the highways he hates. A few decades later it’s the polluter-sponsored ...”

“... warned ‘Mature Readers Only!!’ I felt less guilty: the words were a flashing neon sign that said ‘read me.’ Whatever fantasy you can’t act out in real life can be fulfilled in fan fiction. May-December relationships are very popular, as are boys transforming into girls. BDSM has a huge following. But the most common sexual ‘perversion’ is gay ...”

“... There are​ self-trained artists; then there are self-willed ones. Edward Burne-Jones, like Vincent Van Gogh, was one of the latter. That’s to say, he decided, in 1855, to be an artist – he was studying for a theology degree at Oxford at the time – without knowing whether he was capable of being one, perhaps even without considering absence of talent a potential obstacle ...”

“... 19th-century illustrator J.G. Keulemans, a couple (great auk and Himalayan mountain quail) by Edward Lear. He also embellishes the historical account where possible with portraits of the sailors, explorers and naturalists who recorded (and sometimes helped to extinguish) a species and biographical snippets about them – all of which provides an important ...”

“... what is the organisation of these animals, we can scarcely conjecture.’ Much the same could be said today, 140 years on from the voyage of the Nautilus, with less than 5 per cent of the world’s 320 million cubic miles of ocean having so far been explored, and an estimated 50 million unknown species thriving in its depths. Like space exploration, a branch ...”