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“... difficulty of finding servants, staying with Max Beerbohm, the Test series, his first meeting with Thomas Hardy, the shortcomings of his wife/son/daughter-in-law, his neglect by the critics – this last a recurring theme. ‘They don’t understand what a talent I have for light verse.’ He had no pudeur about expressing his resentments or his ...”

“... and informative, although some of the history is shaky. For example, Goodrich attempts to connect Thomas More’s defence of ecclesiastical interpretative prerogative to Edward Coke’s similar claims for legal expertise, without apparently being aware that More’s own concept of law was essentially transparent. In ...”

“... the saying was, more Irish than the Irish themselves’. The first-known of the name was Thomas Joyce, one of whose brothers was Archbishop of Armagh, a seat he resigned to another brother, Roland, who was confessor to Edward II of England – no doubt an interesting job to hold where gossip was concerned. And no ...”

“... have identified a variety of sources for Campanella’s idiosyncratic vision, from Plato to Thomas More. What no one before Noel Malcolm noticed – although it would be unmistakable to any student of the early modern Middle East – is the extent to which the city of the sun was modelled on the Ottoman Empire.From the Renaissance to the ...”

“... Bar-Yosef’s persuasively argued study is to suggest that the influential model developed in Edward Said’s Orientalism won’t quite do as an explanation of popular English perceptions of the Holy Land. Said was steadily committed to the Palestinian cause, but the school of postcolonial criticism which he fathered has not fully appreciated the cultural ...”

“... Protestants; Ruth and Jonah in Southern Swahili (spoken in the region of Zanzibar), translated by Edward Steere (1828-82), Zanzibar, 1868, and Saint Matthew by the same translator, London, 1869; Saint Matthew in Susu (spoken in French Guinea, West Africa), probably translated by J.H.A. Dupont (a West Indian of African descent, from Codrington ...”

“... And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us ...”

“... created an eerie production of Ghosts with designs by Edvard Munch. The British director Edward Gordon Craig dreamed up stylised productions of several Ibsen plays. It was Ibsen’s ambivalence that made his plays so adaptable. He was an autodidact who remained wary of abstract debates and positions; he was divided and uncertain about most of the ...”

“... reader, much affected by a series of iconoclastic texts she encountered early in life, including Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and William Godwin’s Political Justice. She favoured the rights of women (perhaps as a result of reading Mary Wollstonecraft), and briefly attempted to found a Godwinian commonwealth with her brother. She had no time for ...”

“... on the continent had induced a more temperate climate – a view shared by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Gibbon read meteorological reports from the colonies and drew a parallel between 18th-century Canada and ancient Germany, where, before the bogs were drained, forests cleared and the soil exposed to the warming effects of the sun, the climate ...”

“... a male heir through six successive brides produced only one legitimate son, and when young King Edward died in his teens, it left Edward’s half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, to succeed to the crown. Both had survived various indecisive marriage negotiations proposed by their father, and once liberated from much male ...”

“... live in a far more squeamish culture. The roots of this run deep. In 1870, the American doctor Edward Clarke argued that girls needed to be educated differently from boys during adolescence: ‘For the development and perfectation of the reproductive system … force must be allowed to flow thither in an ample stream, and not diverted to the brain by the ...”

“... to be made, given that relations remained so close for so long? Presumably, we have Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, ‘revolutionary politician and president of the United States’) but not Dwight Eisenhower because the former was born in what was still a British colony, though the latter spent more time in this country and arguably had a greater ...”

“... Auden said in an interview a few months before he died. Thanks to the magnificent efforts of Edward Mendelson, it’s now all here: prose, plays, libretti and, finally, the poems, coming to just over 7500 pages all told. Sizing up these volumes, one might take courage from a line in ‘The Labyrinth’: ‘Assume this maze has got a plan.’ Many maps ...”

“... what sort of heroine she was going to be. When she had finished a 65,000-word novel celebrating Edward Sackville, a modest hero of the Civil War, she added a coy ‘author’s note’ – she was then 14 – in which she wondered whether he could see her and if he knew ‘how I wish to be like him’. (This coyness is infectious: Mrs Glendinning in her ...”