“... 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 ...”

“... was a commitment from one of the political parties; hence the question Annie Kenney shouted at Sir Edward Grey at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester: ‘Will the Liberal government give women the vote?’ It would not: the cabinet was divided. H.H. Asquith, prime minister from 1908, was an ‘anti’, and the government was in any case preoccupied with its ...”

“... Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.’ And again, in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx himself’). Engels disliked him intensely, and it didn’t help that Hyndman, hiding behind the name Broadhouse, had published selections from Capital in an ...”

“... from’ echoes the reckoning with British colonial education in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s writings on ‘Nation Language’, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey and Austin Clarke’s Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack, among others. Much like these precursors, Brand is ...”

“... PENCE (‘shame on him who thinks evil of it’), the motto of the Order of the Garter, founded by Edward III in 1348. The meaning complicates; we are left to reflect on the nicked neck of blemished perfection.Any book made by hand is unique, but the Pearl Manuscript’s claim to uniqueness is unparalleled: the manuscript appears never to have been copied or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... prays that ‘man’s long journey through the night / May not have been in vain.’ When Gascoyne said he belonged to Europe rather than England, you can see what he had in mind, but too much of the poetry as a result seems to occupy an uneasy linguistic no man’s land, somewhere between Paris and home in Teddington. Like Devlin’s and Coffey’s, much of ...”

“... 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 ...”