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“... Murdoch in 1939, have to do with his execution? In E.P.’s account, this question looms large (Edward had joined the party in 1942 before being called up). He believes the answer is yes and argues that while Frank was in Bulgaria decisions were being made in Whitehall that were no less prejudicial to the mission than Dimitrov’s instructions from ...”

“... but frequently more discursive than some might think the occasion requires, as when the late Edward Said is chastised at length for his errant opinion of A Passage to India. Forster’s devotees, a party that includes the present editor, are clearly unwilling to treat the paralipomena of an admired author as undeserving of the fullest canonical ...”

“... is also present, but the implied comparison seems to be stylistic rather than thematic.) Edward St Aubyn and Karl Ove Knausgaard, with their bad dads, would also have been apt. The critic Sam Sacks has called such books ‘agony novels’, but agony by itself isn’t usually enough. The third volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle is immersed in the ...”

“... for bigger battles.The most damaging of these involved a popular young economist on the faculty, Edward Ross, whose public pronouncements against capitalism in general and railroad companies in particular so affronted Jane that she demanded Jordan fire him. Academic freedom had been a contentious issue on campuses since the rows over the teaching of ...”

“... formed less than two years previously (they would become the King’s Men after the accession of James I in 1603). They were already the most popular troupe in town, with their leading actor Richard Burbage and their star comic Will Kempe, and their player-poet Shakespeare turning out such hits as Romeo and Juliet, Richard III and A Midsummer Night’s ...”

“... extraction named Melanie Klein. It was largely thanks to the efforts of Alix and her husband James in bringing Klein to the attention of the British Psycho-Analytical Society that she moved to London in 1926 after the death of Abraham. He had been Klein’s mentor and analyst, and without him she had little defence against the hostility that was ...”

“... figure of them all, the Prince of Wales, who became Lewis’s personal friend. The future King Edward sought legal advice from him in connection with, among other embarrassments to the cherished image of royalty as the seat of virtue, the sticky Mordaunt divorce case, in which the Prince was forced to testify, and the Tranby Croft cheating-at-baccarat ...”

“... who slaughtered five thousand wild beasts on the opening day of the Colosseum. It was left to James I to popularise baiting as an attraction at the Tower, thus promoting the sport from the disreputable status it enjoyed in the urban bear gardens. For better viewing, James refashioned the Lion Tower, but there was little ...”

“... an attempt to diminish the opulent magnificence of the Mughal court. Yet he was the ambassador of James VI and I, who had advised his heir, Prince Henry, in Basilicon Doron (1599) that ‘a king is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures all the people gazingly do behold.’Ten months after the audience at Ajmer, Jahangir’s favoured ...”

“... It was about property, and how best those who had it could keep it safe from those who hadn’t. Edward Pearce was an eloquent and observant parliamentary commentator for the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian. He delighted and, to his credit, often infuriated his readers with his sardonic wit and readable prose. Eventually shunned by both papers, he wrote an ...”

“... to do with the real-life Peter Morrison MP but was inspired by boyhood memories of the real-life James Prior. The fictional ‘Peter Morrison MP’ reappears in Morning Star, the first volume of Raven’s new novel sequence, but now he seems nothing like James Prior MP. We are more likely to think of ...”

“... a type of celebrity now.’ He contrasts Ledger, who died three years ago at the age of 28, with James Dean, who died 55 years ago at the age of 24 and became the standard against which all young, handsome, would-be acting geniuses in Hollywood are measured. It’s not only, Thomson says, that Ledger wasn’t the actor Dean was. It’s that movies, and their ...”

“... on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a magnificent incuriosity, I never thought to wonder at the strangeness of a post box positioned to enable a dictionary – it was simply where I deposited weekly letters to my friend Marian, who ...”

“... is a snip at £18.The abbey’s association with royalty and power is woven into its fabric. Edward the Confessor built the first abbey, next to his palace at Westminster, in 1042, and William the Conqueror became the first king to be crowned in it, on Christmas Day 1066. Henry II, fancying a saint in the family, bought ...”

“... is unfortunate that Evans decided to end a book so full of new and interesting material with Sir Edward Grey’s familiar lament on 3 August 1914 that Europe’s lamps were being extinguished – a darkness for which Grey himself was partly responsible.) Was it bad luck, a few miscalculations made by a handful of statesmen that set in motion the 20th ...”