“... Their ideology, however, is a cultural version of it. Until recently, as the Barbadan poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite says, West Indians ‘have been unable to afford the luxury of mythology’. Colonial history offers merely divisive images which can only provoke nostalgia, remorse, shame or rancour. Hence many West Indian writers have sought to re-align ...”

“... Antonia, and the letters reveal the existence of a protracted infatuation or love affair with a young man called Charles Thurstan Edward-Collins (the possessor of the ‘grey feminine eyes’). Louis returned to Marlborough to visit after he left for Oxford. (‘I told Charles I wasn’t coming to M.C. any more but I ...”

“... law during the Morant Bay rebellion, ‘may be done in Ireland tomorrow and England hereafter.’ Edward Beesly, a member of the parliamentary Jamaica Committee, compared the rebellion to the Hyde Park demonstrations in support of universal male suffrage in 1866, and concluded that Harrison’s prediction was already a reality: ‘In both instances, wealth ...”

“... a non-starter, whether as wit or gentleman, for ‘squab’ also means an inexperienced person, young pigeon or unfledged bird. Birds came in handy, you might say, in lordly imputations of sexual inadequacy, as when Fielding called Lord Hervey Lord Didapper. The Earl was giving Dryden the ‘scribbling author’ the sort of lofty treatment which commoners ...”

“... was, however, saddled at this time as on several occasions with the chaotic if aristocratic poet Edward James (whose laugh Craft compares to ‘a hornbill in the jungle’). Ordinary people only really crop up as mad admirers of Auden or vague conquests – ‘the pretty blonde [a 1994 recollection] on the Cristoforo Colombo ... with an annoying Eskimostyle ...”

“... by Philibert Commerson, who had himself joined Bougainville’s round the world expedition with a young woman dressed as a man) and whose evasive treatment of his own discovery appears to be symptomatic of inner conflict, is the bolder and more desperate of Kauffmann’s two heroes. ‘He had to face up alone to the disappointment of discovery, the fraud of ...”

“... a crowd to riot, and was said to be behind the suffragette burning of Leuchars Station. Netta held young Hugh in her arms. His mother climbed on a truck. She had words for the crowd, and was sure of them. But heaven knows she was shaking. ‘We know the laws of God well enough about here,’ she said, ‘and we know that justice will be ours, and is harmful ...”

“... Territories. This improvisational drama was like a miniature Truth Commission of the kind that Edward Said has urged, although it will be some time before an Israeli or PLO politician is likely to advocate anything of the sort. Both productions took place in an environment of increasing honesty about what Israelis have done to survive in the country that ...”

“... Rousseau wrote in Emile, it is essential that such images not be dwelt on, especially by young people who are liable to become addicted to them. Never leave a boy alone with his thoughts, he advised parents: ‘At the very least, sleep in his room . . . it is up to you to protect him from himself.’ This was not a counsel for sexual ...”

“... of the 1932 Nobel Prize, was said to be the head of Hitler’s atom bomb effort. He had also been Edward Teller’s PhD supervisor at Leipzig in 1930. In December 1944, the OSS, the CIA’s wartime predecessor, ordered one of its agents in Switzerland, Morris ‘Moe’ Berg, to attend a Heisenberg lecture in Zurich and to carry a pistol. He was to listen ...”

“... We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy dedicates his book. Their increasingly grumpy pronouncements on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’ pepper the pages of Having It So Good. Of the new milk bars, for example, Hoggart ...”

“... of the LRB feel liberated by learning the details of female circumcision? In the same decade, Edward Sapir, analysing many North American languages, advanced the doctrine that a language reflects the way that its speakers understand the world – a way that may be incomprehensible without the language. Kant’s a prioris, structures of the human ...”

“... this in Milton’s day. The last two men burned for heresy in England, Bartholomew Legate and Edward Whiteman in 1612, were antitrinitarians. In the mid-1650s, when Milton was working on De Doctrina Christiana, his contemporary John Biddle was imprisoned and interrogated by a parliamentary committee for publishing antitrinitarian views; Cromwell had ...”

“... raft of publications and exhibitions about the Bloomsbury Group, as well as renewed interest in Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious. Friend’s previous books have included splashy illustrated tomes on Ravilious and on John Nash, but here he turns from figurative British artists in love with British tradition towards figurative British artists who wanted to ...”

“... register with the German Kommandatur. Over the succeeding months, convinced that most of the young German soldiers they met were not Nazis and could be persuaded to rebel against their officers, she and Moore began a DIY subversion campaign of quite startling temerity and panache. Moore knew German well enough to write it almost like a native speaker, so ...”