“... Rosen delivers himself of casual observations – on the decline of writing music for the young, on the nature of virtuosity and the pianist’s need to bear pain, Chopin’s ‘irony and wit but not a trace of humour’ – that sparkle with worldly cleverness and long experience. He is just right, I think, in his account of the Romantic tendency to ...”

“... idiotic and unnecessary tennis knick-knacks like T-shirts and caps, there’s the sullen crowd of young pros dressed as walking billboards for Hertz, Movado or Volvo rather than as tea-sipping athletes in white flannels. Even the commentators are pros (some of them, like Cliff Drysdale and John McEnroe, excellent ones). In nearly every way tennis has become ...”

“... sectarian politics, and of the traditional nationalism offered up by Arafat’s old (rather than young) Fatah activists. It’s called the National Political Initiative (NPI) and its leading figure is Mostapha Barghuti, a Moscow-trained doctor, whose main work has been as director of the impressive Village Medical Relief Committee, which has brought ...”

“... Belgrave Square next door to Prince George, duke of Kent, and duchess of ditto and little Prince Edward. The house is all Regency upstairs with very carefully draped curtains and Madame Récamier sofas and wall paintings. Then the dining room is entered through an orange lobby and discloses itself suddenly as a copy of the blue room at the Amalienburg near ...”

“... in smaller collections containing his correspondence with one or more persons – for example, Edward Garnett, William Blackwood and Cunninghame Graham. Early letters to Polish friends and relations have been translated, and a series of about a hundred to Marguerite Poradowska appeared in the original French. However, it seems that ‘more than a third of ...”

“... rather than be thought ‘difficult’.A propos of which is Whitman’s description of himself to Edward Carpenter: ‘An old hen … with something in my nature furtive’.2 February. Late for a final rehearsal for the tour of Talking Heads I rush out of the house on this bright spring-like morning to be confronted by a large pile of excrement on the ...”

“... through state and society in these years came from the very top. As prince of Wales and then king, Edward VII gambled, had mistresses and corrupted his protectors into indulging his whims, while his son was linked to the sordid allegations about aristocrats and male prostitutes in Cleveland Street. Edward was particularly ...”

“... Some years ago, during an American Presidential election, rumours began to circulate that Senator Edward Kennedy was again thinking of running for the Democratic nomination. A young reporter had the idea of asking ex-President Nixon for his views on this development. ‘If Teddy Kennedy is serious,’ Nixon is alleged to have replied, ‘then the first thing he should do is lose thirty pounds ...”

“... sound like everything else: when Alex first hears Danny in Robin’s kitchen, he hears ‘a young man’s classless indifferent tenor’; a pot of soup on the cooker is ‘a slow imponderable soup on the Rayburn’, elsewhere we find ‘humid unseasonal warmth’, ‘its tenuous accidental story’, ‘sheltered, sunstruck days’, ‘handsome ...”

“... had a pronounced streak of family piety. Commenting on The Man Within, his rich uncle ‘Eppy’ (Edward) told him: ‘It could only have been written by a Greene.’ In his memoir, Greene stages his puzzlement at this remark: ‘I thought of my parents, I thought of all those aunts and uncles and cousins who had gathered together at Christmas, and of the two ...”

“... of France died, leaving three sons. But none of them reigned for more than a few years, each dying young. His daughter Isabella, however, married Edward II of England, and they had a son who became Edward III. That was Edward’s claim to the throne of ...”

“... Asser had said that it was King Alfred’s mother who staged a literacy competition between her young sons, unless the only lay ex libris among Anglo-Saxon manuscripts had been a woman’s, and unless the only two non-clerical wills that even mention books were those of women. The colleague whom I mentioned at the beginning of this piece will soon publish a ...”

“... criminal actions with which he was associated ranged from the charge of indecent assault upon a young woman in a compartment of a London-bound train which ruined a young Army officer’s career, though the evidence offered was far from conclusive, to the trial of Adelaide Bartlett, who ungratefully, and in a manner still ...”

“... the Majestic as the fiancé of Angela Spencer, the eldest daughter of the hotel’s widowed owner, Edward. The Major’s relationship with Angela is largely epistolary – he has dim memories of kissing her in Brighton while on leave, and of afterwards steadying himself on a cactus, ‘which had rendered many of his parting words insincere’ – and though he ...”

“... isolation and emptiness, a space where new and old selves can be found and lost. Alex Darken is a young poet whose marriage has broken up, and who has borrowed a cottage in Norfolk in which to lick his wounds. He meets a burnt-out older poet and his young American mistress, and the foreseeable passions and conflicts ...”