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“... prophets, its – horrible temper’), H.L. Mencken’s jocular scrutiny of the American language, Edmund Wilson’s cold eye cast alike on political rhetoric, Depression politics and American sex, Norman Mailer’s exploding and exploiting of American myths, are notable instances. And this hasn’t only been a male preserve: witness the admirable Janet ...”

“... childhood; and that in Late Victorian autobiographical writing – as by Wilde or George Moore or Edmund Gosse – a new note of deliberate self-dramatisation appears. In places, Buckley engages in unacceptable oversimplification. He argues, for instance, that Sons and Lovers and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are autobiographical novels of a broadly ...”

“... but assures her that ‘it will be splendid ... to pass with such companions as I have.’ Dr Wilson, according to his obituary in the Times, ‘beautifully lit up the wastes’, and Scott, in his last message, found in the tent with the three bodies, declared: ‘We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake, I do not regret this journey, which ...”

“... and excretion and their relationship to literary activity has attracted previous scholars, and Edmund Wilson’s essay of 1948, ‘Morose Ben Jonson’, is perhaps the best known example of what it can lead to. Anxious to pin the desperate label ‘anal neurotic’ on the poet, Wilson duly listed ...”

“... to laugh at a person, than to do him any real injury’. As the Elizabethan humanist Thomas Wilson wrote, ‘the occasion of laughter and the mean that maketh us merry … is the fondness, the filthiness, the deformity, and all such evil behaviour as we see to be in other[s].’ In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton made the same point from ...”

“... Collinson has written two earlier major works, one on Elizabethan Puritanism, the other a life of Edmund Grindal, Elizabeth’s defiant Archbishop of Canterbury. Here he moves forward into the reign of James I. This has been the dark period of the Church of England: the middle ground lost between books on the English Revolution and the Elizabethan Church on ...”

“... a sympathetic biography by Peter Conradi, which may be too kind to her, and a sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she has had too much press as the novelist who did a lot of shagging and ...”

“... of the exiled Stuart Court, and emerging as a writer for pay under the imprint of the notorious Edmund Curll – can, however, be tracked. Jane Barker, Exile isn’t so much a biography of Barker as ‘the biography of a remarkable literary career’. To tell the story of a literary career, remarkable or not (and whether this one was remarkable is one of ...”

“... say, the sophistication of the Federalist Papers. There are of course the American speeches of Edmund Burke, and they still read wonderfully. But they were heard by men trained to understand nothing but the absolute sovereignty of the king-in-Parliament, and for whom ideas of federation or devolution, let alone self-government, were delusory or actively ...”

“... went to Lord Rothschild on 2 November 1917, when British forces commanded by General Sir Edmund Allenby were overrunning Palestine. ‘Weizmann’s principal achievement,’ Segev writes, ‘was to create among British leaders an identity between the Zionist movement and “world Jewry” – Lloyd George referred to “the Jewish race”, “world ...”

“... subject under the sun. He cannot bear, for example, to mention Lord Balogh, the Balliol don Harold Wilson recruited as an economic adviser in 1964, without telling us what it was like to be an inter-war Hungarian radical under ‘a sclerotic, semi-fascist regime, brooding over its Habsburg past’, or to talk about Norway without throwing in a series of quick ...”

“... sport, but in the late Nineties it suddenly looks like the critical craze of the moment. Richard Wilson, for example, published an article in the TLS a few months ago reviving the claim that the young William Shakespeare can be identified with the actor William Shakeshafte who is named in the will of one of ...”

“... is always stimulated to an astonishing degree by clever blackguardism’) he hired Lockhart and Wilson, a couple of Scottish lawyers as blackguardly as they were cynical. ‘Wilson was tall, burly, fair-haired, florid-complexioned, gregarious: Lockhart small, dark, atrabilious, conspiratorial.’ What does that sentence ...”

“... Nothing substantive was achieved, while, as the British commander of Allied forces in the north, Edmund Ironside, noted at the time of the British withdrawal from North Russia in the autumn of 1919, the cost was to incur ‘the everlasting enmity of both sides – the Whites for deserting them, and the Reds for opposing them’.Anna Reid, author of the ...”

“... Heren led no cavalry into action, he at least became adventurously involved in the search for Sir Edmund Hillary, who was missing on Makalu in Nepal. When he offered to cable an account of his own experiences he received (as he tells in Growing upon the ‘Times’) the reply: ‘No, the readers of the Times are not interested in the adventures of its ...”