“... other biographers see these warnings against worldly satisfaction as serving only to encourage the young Rossetti’s tendencies towards self-immolation. If the expected return of Christ would provide fantasy compensation for all her losses on this side of the grave, it would also tacitly justify her continuing to chalk them up. But this could be put more ...”

“... of others. Her essay ‘The Imaginary Orient’, published in 1983, was among the first to import Edward Said’s work on Orientalism into art history. Written in response to an exhibition of unapologetically Orientalist painting at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, and the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, New York, it took aim at the curators for ruling out ...”

“... lowered, post offices were built, mailboxes were attached to lamp posts and home delivery allowed young women to receive letters without visiting a space full of loungers who were up to no good. Systems didn’t always function smoothly, and dead letters piled up, providing journalists with homely material for columns. But the scale of the enterprise was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Oxbridge meritocracy recruited through provincial grammar schools. When Denis Healey encountered Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins at Balliol just before the Second World War, such was their tryst with destiny. This was in Healey’s Communist phase, which lasted until the fall of France. When the Marxist-dominated Labour Club split in 1940, he opposed Jenkins ...”

“... and energy. With such training one would not only be confident and invincible, one would remain young for ever, just as Chanel herself seemed to do, and as her clothes allowed any woman to do. Simple garments in clear shapes and subdued colours are very becoming to lined faces and ageing figures, as the masculine scheme for clothes attests. Chanel’s use ...”

“... in addition campaigned for the revived Malthusian League. At the same time, under the influence of Edward Aveling, she became excited by a romantically-tinged version of Darwinism and was among the first women to embark on a science degree at University College London. She lived round the corner from Bradlaugh, and his daughters became fellow students. But ...”

“... Radnor Parliamentarian – and Eva Figes’s source of inspiration for this volume – to her son Edward: ‘I have sent your tutor a box of dried plums, the box is directed to you; tell him it is a Lenten token.’ From Elizabeth Mackenzie, nursing in the Crimea, in 1855, to her aunt: ‘Your box has at length arrived safely and its contents are most useful ...”

“... of Western Orientalism and of Eastern Occidentalism, both of which Tagore confounded. Edward John Thompson (1886-1946) was then an educational missionary at the Wesleyan College at Bankura. He had published several volumes of verse, and was approaching proficiency in Bengali. After a brief meeting in Calcutta, Tagore invited him to visit him at ...”

“... own way and saw no reason not to have it in matters of state as well as at home. All in all the young queen had more in common with her unpopular and self-indulgent uncles George IV and William IV than the fresh-faced appearance and the famous promise to ‘be good’ suggested. Courtiers and Victoria herself recorded tearful scenes and door slamming on her ...”

“... 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 ...”