“... hope; the narrower the gap, the less obvious it is that the fantasy is something to wish for. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000-1887 foretells a third-millennium Boston where people are still bad enough to be offered plea-bargains under the threat of a doubled sentence if they plead not guilty. It’s not just a question of what counterfactuals ...”

“... at Owen’s College in Manchester, ‘what kinds of habits &c I had to overcome when I was young & thinking of speaking to others.’ But he took pains to learn, and to fashion a suitable character for his performances. Dignified, unostentatious, unforced, he became the handsome, masculine face of Victorian public science, a gentleman who could command ...”

“... at Athelney in 878, then goes on through the English recovery under his many descendants down to Edward the Confessor, and the eventual unification of England under the West Saxon dynasty. How did the story look elsewhere, and how might it have looked if things had gone slightly differently? Fleming focuses on three widely different places: Llangorse near ...”

“... Endeavour and as the East India Company acquired the right to collect taxes in Bengal; it ended as Edward Gibbon Wakefield was developing schemes for the ‘systematic colonisation’ of Australia and New Zealand. In 1750, around 12.5 million people lived under British dominion. When Malthus died in 1834 that number was at least 200 million, roughly a quarter ...”

“... PENCE (‘shame on him who thinks evil of it’), the motto of the Order of the Garter, founded by Edward III in 1348. The meaning complicates; we are left to reflect on the nicked neck of blemished perfection.Any book made by hand is unique, but the Pearl Manuscript’s claim to uniqueness is unparalleled: the manuscript appears never to have been copied or ...”

“... it got just 28 per cent. But even in 1987, with party political videos to remind the nation that Young Upwardly-Mobile Kinnocks – ‘Yuk-kies’, Jenkins can’t resist suggesting – had displaced the wild-eyed patricians, it got only 32. Neil Kinnock had said that to ‘lose badly’ was to come in with less than 250 seats. The Party won just 229. The ...”

“... or salivary glands o death take them lightly as the Colombian goddess who makes love to young warriors on the battlefield holding a butterfly between her lips. The exotic connection that this poem proposes, between a modern nuclear disaster and a South American myth, has an acceptably eerie quality, the symmetrical delicacy of the details ...”

“... riding-habits. The same year Henry Poole became tailor to the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, and soon both Worth and Poole, who had actually helped finance the Emperor’s return to France, had established a vast clientele of kings, princes and grand-dukes, stretching across Europe and beyond. Worth dressed the Princess von Metternich, Poole ...”

“... goes mad, Rimbaud abandons writing, Lautréamont dies abnormally young): i.e. the poet’s destiny is to risk madness despair and death for the sake of a possibility of a redeeming existence by means of the secret power of the Word. In a footnote to this apotheosis of the poet as doomed super-rationalist, avatar of the ...”

“... from within the consulting room. There is a story, though, from his years of fame, that when Edward Kennedy came over from Hyannisport to consult him about running for President, Erikson asked him to think about what kind of old age he wanted. He had at first been doubtful about the whole psychoanalytical milieu, so ‘intensely verbal’ as he described ...”

“... variously at about 50 per cent (1998) and 84 per cent (1999). Lord Callaghan, Lady Thatcher, Sir Edward Heath, John Major and Cardinal Winning all met the Commissioners. So did the editors of the Times and the Guardian, Lord Habgood, Lord Howe, the Duke of Buccleuch (the only duke to surface), Professors Scruton and Bogdanor, as well as spokesmen for Ubley ...”

“... pacifists (‘put the lot behind barbed wire’), bureaucrats, brass hats and blimps. In 1940 Edward Hulton, the proprietor of Picture Post, said that Cudlipp was an uncomfortable sort of young man to meet. He is a revolutionary. I don’t mean he is filled up with a stock of ballyhoo about Karl Marx, or that he ...”

“... on Baudelaire, Roland Barthes on Balzac, Fredric Jameson on Conrad, Julia Kristeva on Mallarmé, Edward Said on Jane Austen, Paul de Man on Proust, Gilles Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some ...”

“... of a huge and unpleasant prejudice, and here it is: when a bright, healthy and highly educated young man jumps on the sleeper train and heads this way, with the declared intention of seeking ‘wild places’, my first reaction is to groan. It brings out in me a horrible mix of class, gender and ethnic tension. What’s that coming over the hill? A ...”

“... boycott, which made King a national figure; the confrontation in the streets of Birmingham between young Black demonstrators and ‘Bull’ Connor’s dogs and fire hoses; and the march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery. Eig’s admiration for King is obvious, but he is not reluctant to point out failures, such as the Chicago Freedom Movement and the ...”