“... for one difference. In a well-ordered and stable society (England in the time of the gross Edward), children are as clearly defined a minority group as Jews and Negroes in other times and places.’ The beleaguered nature of these fictional families (several of whom are further isolated by the death or misfortune of a parent) gives Nesbit’s books a ...”

“... for controversy. The novel is tremendously fluent if not precise or subtle – Ring Lardner Jr said that Trumbo’s writing ‘was almost as facile as his speech’. His predilection for a certain kind of freewheeling bombast often led him to take up radical stances he couldn’t maintain. His opposition to war failed to survive Operation Barbarossa and ...”

“... variously at about 50 per cent (1998) and 84 per cent (1999). Lord Callaghan, Lady Thatcher, Sir Edward Heath, John Major and Cardinal Winning all met the Commissioners. So did the editors of the Times and the Guardian, Lord Habgood, Lord Howe, the Duke of Buccleuch (the only duke to surface), Professors Scruton and Bogdanor, as well as spokesmen for Ubley ...”

“... spoke only once before he pulled the lever and the wooden trapdoor opened beneath her. She said: “Here we are again!” Her eyes were still upon them as she fell.’ The same mixture, black farce, ceremonies of death, catch-phrases. The executioner in clown make-up. Mr and Mrs Punch having their little ‘domestics’, in company with ...”

“... riding-habits. The same year Henry Poole became tailor to the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, and soon both Worth and Poole, who had actually helped finance the Emperor’s return to France, had established a vast clientele of kings, princes and grand-dukes, stretching across Europe and beyond. Worth dressed the Princess von Metternich, Poole ...”

“... the saviour of Paradise’, ‘O terra incognita’. All of this brings to mind what Frost once said about ecphonesis: ‘American poets use it in practically one tone, that of grandeur: “Oh Soul!” “Oh Hills!” – “Oh Anything!” That’s the way they go. But think of what “oh” is really capable: the “oh” of scorn, the “oh” of ...”

“... of the national past against the incursions of the contemporary and the foreign: It has been said, and I believe truly, that every individual of this country, whose mind has been at all cultivated, feels a pride in being able to boast of our great dramatick poet, Shakspeare, as his countryman: and proportionate to our respect and veneration for that ...”

“... dominance was reinforced by the combination of Christianity and barbarian conquest, which, as Edward Gibbon observed in the case of the Roman Empire, is a very effective destroyer of cultures. With all due respect to Las Casas and to the moral scruples of the Spanish crown, with all admiration for the Jesuits’ protection of the Indians, we must never ...”

“... the house intact with all its jumble in the box room. ‘Go ahead and look in there,’ Vera said … In the box room were cartons and papers and rolls of things she’d inherited from an aunt who had worked for Mary Ellen and Henry’s son, Harold (who was called Felix). Vera had seen Felix in his old age … [she] was a beautiful woman in her seventies ...”

“... to ‘speak … sing … fight and work’ for it. One of Tyndall’s fellow Queenwood teachers, Edward Frankland, had been invited to work with the chemist Robert Bunsen in Marburg, and in 1848 Tyndall decided to join him in Germany and study for a PhD, using his savings from railway surveying. In Marburg, he rose at 5 a.m., sitting in the cold in a ...”

“... to humans in a country ‘still under the rule of dogmatism’.At home Darwin came under fire from Edward Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford and a leading figure in the Tractarian Movement. Pusey preached a sermon, which he then published, in which he not only attacked evolutionary theory, but impugned Darwin’s motives, accusing him of using science ...”

“... the viability of the prostitution trade – also had military associations because they were said to have been invented by Colonel Condom, doctor to Charles II. Those who wanted to stop the spread of venereal infection used the connection to present protected sex as more heroic than unarmoured. An anonymous mock-epic of 1744, The Machine, or Love’s ...”

“... persistence of the coil of circumstance. In January 1918, Rosenberg wrote from the trenches to Edward Marsh, the compiler of Georgian Poetry, and one of the several friends that Rosenberg would make through his poetry: ‘We spend most of our time pulling each other out of the mud.’ In some sense, his subject is the struggle to wrest poetry from the ...”

“... handiwork with a slight smile. After a long pause, he pointed to a particular equation . . . and said: ‘I really like that one.’ Imperial College undergraduates were understandably unenthusiastic about his teaching. ‘During the classes most students would be good-humouredly chatting or perhaps deep in their morning newspapers,’ he recalled. ‘And ...”

“... In his 1986 article, ‘Moscow Folkways’, which Getty frequently cites, the Muscovite historian Edward Keenan drew attention to the persistence of ‘deep structures’ of Muscovite origin in Soviet political behaviour, irrespective of changing ideology and institutions. Stalin’s biographer Robert Tucker was keen on the resemblance between Stalin and the ...”