“... 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 ...”

“... realised the harm the footage had done and tracked down the cameraman who had taken the pictures, Edward Chikombo. His body was discovered some days later. These events brought about a change in tactics by Mugabe and Mbeki. Mbeki’s fundamental position was that, as a fellow national liberation movement (NLM), Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF had to be maintained ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the story of how Merlin’s mother was visited in her convent by a being in the form of a handsome young man, who could appear and disappear at will. He is characterised, on the authority of Apuleius, as an incubus daemon, a spirit who is part-human, part-angelic (a neat compromise between two opposing views). But didn’t his fathering of Merlin contradict ...”

“... a radical disjuncture but a return to the perfection of the primitive church.Many puritans were young, rejecting convention and seeking an identity. The Hebrew scholar Henry Ainsworth spent his early twenties drifting from Norfolk to London to Ireland to Amsterdam, subsisting on boiled roots and the word of God. Even mature figures such as Robert ...”

“... doubled and thousands of new staff had been hired. Many of the revelations in the papers leaked by Edward Snowden (which Kerbaj refers to as ‘stolen documents’) had to do with systems brought in for the new era of mass surveillance. The general scope of the established programmes had already been revealed by the brilliant work of the investigative ...”

“... to make a name for himself in the history of religion. Another friend, the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, had convinced him that myths originated independently around the world in the thought processes of ‘savage’ peoples. Such speculations contradicted the theories of Friedrich Max Müller, the comparative philologist who then dominated ...”

“... festivals. Surprisingly perhaps, there were more Americans than Belgians, and the majority were young, born between 1800 and 1810. Whether this reflects the overall composition of the visitors, or merely of those who thought it would be fun to sign the visitors’ book, is unknowable. The big fish Brewer catches is Charles Babbage, who came in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sanitary and convenience products spewing into London’s river. Taylor Geall, the bright young fabulist charged by his Super Sewer employers, Tideway, with selling an upbeat message about reconnecting Londoners with the Thames (even when large sections of river frontage were closed off for the construction), commutes from Bognor Regis. His repurposed ...”

“... fossilised under the uninspiring aegis of the British Communist Party. The founders of NLR were Edward Thompson, the great radical historian of rural and working-class England, and the Jamaican social thinker Stuart Hall, who would later become known as one of the founders of cultural studies. The Young Turks had only ...”

“... not have been published had Frost not upped sticks and relocated his family – Elinor and four young children – to England in 1912. He was 38. He had placed individual poems in American magazines but no publisher had shown interest in a book, and the teaching he had undertaken to supplement his farming income was exhausting and impossible to do in tandem ...”