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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... non-prescriptive approach: for it must have been what inspired the ‘composite’ biography by Edward Nehls of thirty years ago, in which the biographer stood aside and allowed the torch of narrative to be handed on from one to another of a relay of competing voices. This seems to raise some fundamental questions about biography, or at least literary ...”

“... against all comers. Gentlemen considered Chamberlain’s judgment and character unreliable. Sir Edward Grey called him ‘a dangerous man, because being very masterful, impulsive and sanguine, he always believes he can get through a tight place by pushing’. It was his personality, more than his ideas, which really threatened the traditions of Victorian ...”

“... including coconuts. Some days later, on 27 April 1789, Bligh came on deck in the morning and said that his personal store of coconuts had shrunk. After a great deal of fuss and hectoring he made all hands turn out their own nuts, threatening them with this and that; and according to some accounts he called Christian, his acting lieutenant, a liar and a ...”

“... though whether for himself or itself is not always clear (at Béranger’s funeral, Baudelaire said to Roger de Beauvoir: ‘Make no mistake, I am in mourning for Les Fleurs du mal’). Perhaps only Baudelaire could have imagined coffins at the sound of logs being unloaded on a winter’s afternoon. He compared his heart to ‘chambres d’éternel ...”

“... to the remark that he could never again vote for the Liberals, because they were the party of Sir Edward Grey. That remark surely indicates what had been, in the technical sense, a traumatic experience. One of the key temptations of socialism, to a former liberal optimist, was the belief that, as Dr Ryan puts it, ‘only socialism could avert another ...”

“... with Pyongyang told me that North Korea could hold out: ‘Our biggest surprise,’ he said, ‘is that juche (Kim II Sung’s strategy of ‘self-reliance’) actually seems to work – if at a very high cost.’ But reunification will also proceed cautiously because the participants recognise that, while the process will lead to the disappearance ...”

“... of government policy under her was done very much in combination with them, as it is also said to be under her successor. Furthermore, the semi-paralysis in which the Labour Party now operates is primarily a result of its fear of how the tabloids will treat anything other than silence. Lord Gilmour describes the tabloids as effectively ...”

“... Stefan from late 1940, she describes an encounter with the ‘beautiful nonsensical drawings’ of Edward Lear. ‘I felt electrified,’ she writes, ‘like someone who can suddenly feel the ground alive under her feet again. I cried like a fool looking at those wonderful drawings.’ Now her own line thins as she finds her signature style in the Lear-like ...”

“... of the trial. Castlehaven’s unrepentant behaviour in his last weeks was so impressive that Edward Hyde, who became Earl of Clarendon, was among those who became convinced of his innocence. Later, in the darkest hours of the Civil War, he was to hold up this convicted sodomite and rapist as a model of how to behave in the worst of circumstances. Cynthia ...”

“... NFT’s regular retrospectives of Hollywood film noir, so I came to Bogart (as to Cagney, Raft, Edward G., Stanwyck, Hayworth, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Gloria Grahame) retrospectively and as a ready-made – I think I need to use the word – icon. They were vast beings moving across the screen, on prints patinated with the time that had passed. The women ...”

“... white shirt and white flannel trousers, took charge of a punting trip on the Cam. ‘Oh yes,’ he said later, ‘I did the fresh, boyish stunt, and it was a great success.’ James sent thanks to all concerned, ‘with a definite stretch towards the Rupert’, and after the poet’s death in 1915 he agreed to write a preface to Brooke’s Letters from ...”

“... not a great deal of ingenuity themselves.’ One of these dull elves was Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, whose 1870 Memoir of Jane Austen captured the public’s imagination with its portrayal of Austen as the masterful miniaturist. Like her novels, Austen has always been read in different ways and Austen-Leigh took full advantage of the reading ...”