“... showed them to be poor passionless creatures compared with him and Frieda. If in spite of what he said he sometimes suspected that regularly knocking each other black and blue was not an infallible sign of married happiness, he would have held the insight against Katherine. In his very mixed feelings about her, resentment played a large part. In the terminal ...”

“... people were adapting and tailoring the formulae before them. The shift towards iconoclasm under Edward is charted, and we are shown the increasing readiness of Protestants to answer yes to Archbishop Arundel’s old question: ‘were it a fair thing to come into a church and see therein none image?’ The conspicuous exception to this trend, as many readers ...”

“... the sample) reported experiencing 1550 incidents within the previous 12 months, 85 of which they said had been reported to the Police as racial attacks. Given that these 116 individuals represent a larger population of perhaps 12,500 potential black victims throughout the borough, one would have expected something in the region of 9200 separate incidents to ...”

“... In 1930, Steinbeck met the most influential figure in the formation of his writer’s philosophy, Edward Ricketts. A maverick marine zoologist, Ricketts was adopted by Steinbeck as his guru; he passed down to his disciple the biological materialism that was to run through all the subsequent writing (its most memorable expression is Rose of Sharon’s suckling ...”

“... in saying, ‘We are no longer what we were,’ does not feel obliged to add ‘Alas’. That much said, and while many of Seidel’s poems are hi-tech performances, I find that the poems that stay most powerfully in my mind are broodings upon the dreadful, where there is no question of being charmed or conned but only of being appalled. Some of these poems ...”

“... Getting to know the great body of music from Bach to Sibelius was ‘far more educative’, he said, than being dragged through dead languages. From Mozart, ‘the master of masters’, he believed he had learnt how to say profound things in a lively way. Ernest Newman, with whom Shaw crossed swords over Wagner and Richard Strauss (their long fencing ...”

“... grist to Constant’s radical mill, and he gleefully took on Bottom Dogs by the American writer Edward Dahlberg: a book so shocking that it was published in a limited edition of 500 copies with gilt tops at 15 shillings – double the normal price of novels. But when Arnold Bennett, then at the height of his fame as a critic, wrote that ‘it took you by ...”

“... a complex but initially local English identity. Before too many readers protest, let it be said that the foregoing paragraph is an experiment in taking an ‘Irish’ view, looking at English literature to see if it will conform to an Irish (or Scottish or American) model. The new books by Seamus Deane and Liam de Paor are judicious and informative in ...”

“... Shakespearean scholar called Roland Verre, whose name implies that in him scholarly verity meets Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the real author of Shakespeare if you believe the idiots out there. Verre is brought in by Random House to counter Arthur’s sceptical annotations on what he has come to believe is his father’s forged play. The scholar’s notes ...”

“... of the 19th century could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In Sense and Sensibility Edward Ferrars, who has chosen to do nothing for a living and regrets it, reels off four possibilities:I always preferred the church, as I still do. But that was not smart enough for my family. They recommended the army. That was a great deal too smart for ...”

“... generally to Sidgwick’s disadvantage. The more important immediate influence was provided by Edward Benson, who was about to become an assistant master at Rugby and Sidgwick’s brother-in-law. Eleven years older than Henry, he seems to have been the prime mover in the decision that Henry should go to Rugby and then not to Balliol, but rather to Trinity ...”

“... opposition to the enclosure of local common land. In 1864, a disturbing letter arrived for John Edward Dorington, lord of the manor, and his son: you are robing the working class of the Parish and their offsprings for ever in fact you are not Gentlemen but robbers and vagabonds, however if it is enclosed you shall never receive any benefit thereby as ...”

“... defined in that of basic physics. ‘Science is physics plus abbreviations,’ so such Positivists said. But hardly anyone believes this any more. Reviving the unity of science programme is most of what consilience amounts to. Though Wilson is aware that it’s now pretty much a dead issue among philosophers of science, he thinks ‘its failure, or put more ...”

“... Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was Thomas Rymer, not Edward; it was in the ruins of the Capitol, not the Colosseum, that Gibbon conceived the idea of the Decline and Fall; and Rothesay is not an island. It would be wrong, however, to allow pedantic irritation to mar one’s enjoyment of this wonderful compendium of ...”

“... the introduction of a prices and incomes policy, 43 per cent are in favour of it. (Come back Edward Heath!) On several issues a substantial minority stand out against the orthodox view. In a Party that has done so well out of the first-past-the-post system it is heartening to discover that 23 per cent are in favour of Proportional Representation. Another ...”