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“... risk, but a sound one. In the autumn of 2002, around the time Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards voted to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq, Obama spoke at an antiwar rally in Chicago: What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle, ...”

“... The example just quoted is taken from a volume entitled The Transvaal in War and Peace by Neville Edwards, which was published by the splendidly named H. Virtue and Company. (Almost as good a name as that of Colonel Gunning.) The letterpress includes such articles as ‘Who are the Boers?’ and ‘The Mining Native and his Ways’; its general intellectual ...”

“... a gloomy Puritan history lingers, a trace, perhaps, of the ferocious Calvinist divine Jonathan Edwards. There is also the eerie emptiness of nature in New England, the dark, wooded landscape that seems hollow, and menacing, without a history. Even the streets of Stockbridge seem empty. No one is around. They are, no doubt, in their cars, and another poet ...”

“... kind which the subject could himself have read without perplexity (for example, those by P. D. Edwards, Arthur Pollard, John Halperin, R. C. Terry, Geoffrey Harvey), there are structuralist analyses (for example, Walter Kendrick’s and, in a less doctrinaire manner, James Kincaid’s) and commentary with a feminist slant (by Juliet McMaster, for ...”

“... Weiner a rather bland politician: a striver and a party hack, another jockish pretty boy, a Paul Ryan of the centre left. In the 1980s, just out of college, where he played hockey (still does, every Monday night), Weiner rose through the office of then Congressman Charles Schumer (now known as ‘Wall Street’s senator’), and was elected New York’s ...”

“... the components in it, makes them potent by the share they have in the whole oeuvre. Philip Edwards, in his concise little survey of the main canon, argues that it ‘is a unity, and the meaning of each part is enlarged by recognising the unity.’ He cites Muriel Bradbrook in support of this version of Eliot’s argument about the great tradition being ...”

“... revealed that her mother abandoned her at a bus stop when she was three, lip-syncs against Alyssa Edwards to Willow Smith’s ‘Whip My Hair’. As the song begins, Roxxxy (who hasn’t done well in performance challenges up until this point) steps out of her skirt to reveal a lace bodysuit. Her wig is (intentionally) brassy and wavy, and one of the judges ...”

“... rue de Rivoli. I go with Jean-Claude. Adonis, Yves Bonnefoy, François-Xavier Jaujard and Paul le Jaloux already there. After an hour’s talk, champagne, quiche, sight of copious buffet in neighbouring room gives me nausea. I lie on sofa under rug. Recovered enough to go back to hotel at midnight. Thursday 3: This morning no desire for food, feel ...”

“... identified, and naturally, it was one of these who coshed the train-driver. The likes of Buster Edwards and Jim Hussey come across socially as chaps to go into the jungle with, although novelist Piers Paul Read might demur: despite being warned by Biggs that he was being wound up, he more or less accepted the ...”

“... Trapnel remarks at the beginning of a long monologue on the art of biography. Placed beside Paul Willetts’s oddly spiritless biography, Powell’s portrait seems remarkable. ‘I’m a master of disguise,’ Ross once boasted to a friend, after delightedly – and wrongly – spotting a version of himself in one of Iris Murdoch’s early novels. The ...”

“... steal. In 1975, following a series of mergers which transformed the firm, the Routledge and Kegan Paul archive, dating back to George Routledge’s ‘railway library’ in the mid-19th century and coming forward to Wittgenstein, was deposited, on ‘permanent loan’, at nearby UCL. The Penguin and Hamish Hamilton archives are, substantially, on loan at ...”

“... disintegrated not because it was corrupt, but because it suffered from, and embodied, what Paul Kennedy might call imperial overstretch. The cause of the Empire’s decline and fall was ‘in a sense, its very existence’ (Craddock). Eighteenth-century Europe, by contrast (for Gibbon did not foresee Napoleon), was secured and stabilised by its ...”

“... Painstaking work since the 1950s by a broad range of scholars such as R.B. McDowell, Owen Dudley Edwards, F.S.L. Lyons and Patrick O’Farrell has profoundly altered our understanding: not only have ancient myths been invalidated, but the structure of a genuinely Irish history now exists, free from the Anglo-centric emphasis still common twenty years ...”

“... of Christ that the Pharisees (but not the Sadducees) became believers in personal immortality, St Paul being their most famous Christian convert. Casey admires the ‘unflinching realism’ of Sheol, precisely because it is ‘the fate we could least hope for’, and thus places the human emphasis on life in this world. I think that what he likes about ...”

“... this book I cannot explain,’ he wisely concedes.) But he has come up with a nice idea. Just as Paul Fussell set himself, in The Great War and Modern Memory, to map the mythicisation of the First World War in the popular conscience – the images and icons we remember it by, and how these are themselves symptomatic of the selective desires, prejudices and ...”