“... while prating ineffectually about meritocracy and equality of opportunity. This is very like Edward Norman’s complaint about left-wing clergymen – taking it in turns for two hundred years to emerge from their public schools and discover the poor, as for the first time, and propose useless reforms. If Maud ‘had a weakness’, Sisson offers, ‘it ...”

“... but it did not fundamentally change its course. Like that of his longer lived contemporary David Jones (born five years after Rosenberg, in 1895), Rosenberg’s writing displays a sense of the continuity between a past passionately experienced through poetry and spiritual tradition, and a nearly intolerable present. Rosenberg’s parents were Russian Jews ...”

“... was dubbed knight, he kissed his weapon. Sword responded to sword; swords were symbols. When Edward I’s judges asked Earl Warenne by what warrant he held his lands, the Earl brandished, not charters and legal records, but his ancestral sword, sign of his lineage and of his right to hold lands by the law of conquest. In his stimulating work on Medieval ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a political orator and thinker was yet to take off. Other heavyweights joined a few years later: Edward Gibbon was made a member in 1774 and Adam Smith in 1775. The importance of other members, such as James Boswell and the pioneering linguistician William Jones, was recognised only posthumously. Alongside Johnson himself ...”

“... had known what to look for, just as you would have spotted his counterpart in MI5, Sir John Lewis Jones, in the honours list immediately prior to that). What, then, is the point of the fantastic governmental mumbo-jumbo with which the British ‘Secret Service’ surrounds itself? Although it is a rather youthful bureaucratic invention, only about seventy ...”

“... Chequers which brought together Wilson, his First (and Employment) Secretary Barbara Castle, Jack Jones of the Transport Workers, Hugh Scanlon of the Engineers and Vic Feather, the recently elected TUC General Secretary. The hours of argument circled round the Government’s need – political as much as economic – for legally enforceable constraints on ...”

“... might allow. But the most important contact, which again came through Gertrude Jekyll, was with Edward Hudson, who launched Country Life in 1897. Once more, there was a string of important commissions: Deanery Garden, Lindisfarne Castle, Plumpton Place, and the Country Life building in Covent Garden, Lutyens’s first big city venture. More important, it ...”

“... track of them using a combination of dead reckoning and star positions. In 1948, the psychologist Edward Tolman published an article called ‘Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men’. Watching rats finding their way through a maze, Tolman rejected the strict behaviourist idea that each individual wrong turn was a separate negative stimulus to which the rat ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... put his imprint on the growing movement: Iolo Morganwg. He was born in Glamorgan and christened Edward Williams in 1747. The bardic name by which he is known was not a total invention, for Iolo is a short form of the Welsh form of Edward, Iorwerth, and Morganwg just indicated his native area – ‘Glamorgan Eddie’. He ...”

“... in the Kennedys as a doomed dynasty, a notion which also appears in Thomas’s book, where Edward Kennedy’s abandoning the unfortunate Mary Jo Kopechne to her watery fate is grotesquely assimilated to his brothers’ violent deaths. Unlucky, those Kennedys: if it isn’t assassins, it’s their own failure of nerve. There is also the curious quality ...”

“... this plump epistolary corpus are letters to or from women, in whose company, as Katherine Duncan-Jones has convincingly argued, Sidney seems always to have been most happy, productive and at ease. There are no surviving exchanges with his wife, Frances, or with his sister, Mary, and no letters relating to his time at Wilton House in Wiltshire, where his most ...”

“... combined fact and fiction in their content as well as in their occasion and mode of production. Edward English, a butcher executed for robbery in 1707, tells us that he was ‘Born at South-Gate in Cork, and lived there for the space of Fourteen Years; during which time my poor Parents endeavour’d to keep me to School; soon after I left Cork, and came for ...”