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“... Stefan from late 1940, she describes an encounter with the ‘beautiful nonsensical drawings’ of Edward Lear. ‘I felt electrified,’ she writes, ‘like someone who can suddenly feel the ground alive under her feet again. I cried like a fool looking at those wonderful drawings.’ Now her own line thins as she finds her signature style in the Lear-like ...”

“... fizzing with insects and furious hummingbirds, to hear Walcott speak with such affection about Edward Thomas and John Clare; odd to follow his gaze out to sea and hear him quote Walter de la Mare’s ‘Fare Well’ with its intimations of an English pastoral afterlife. When at the party Glyn Maxwell, or perhaps it was Paul Farley, asked him what it was to ...”

“... for Yeltsin and his family despite their colossal thefts of public money. Nobody is going to send Edward Shevardnadze to jail in Georgia, though some of his greedy relations may be less lucky. Yushchenko probably offered an immunity deal to get the outgoing president, Leonid Kuchma, out of his way; charges against him could range from gross ...”

“... their voices.Peter, now nine, went back to Gezira Preparatory School where, according to Edward Said, a fellow pupil, lessons were ‘mystifyingly English: we read about meadows, castles, and Kings John, Alfred and Canute with the reverence that our teachers kept reminding us they deserved.’ Equally baffling was the tradition of celebrating the ...”

“... past absorbed by Cartier-Bresson also comprised such giants of photography as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen – and look! here’s Stieglitz himself, whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in 1946, the lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another ...”

“... who could be suspected of espionage?’) to convict reports on him as a forestry labourer in the snow (he fulfilled his norm by only 40 per cent, and had a ‘disdainful’ attitude to physical work). The files end with an order that Mirsky be brought back to Moscow from Magadan to face fresh charges of forming a bloc with Trotskyites to engage in ...”

“... he succeeded, ‘by climbing over hedges, walls, and fields’ which were still waist-deep in snow. A generation of historians have shown that Victorian science was deeply implicated in the Victorian state’s global and imperial projects, and Faraday’s involvement was not limited to the ancient perils of inshore navigation. From 1828, he served ...”

“... robes held him down, cut open his chest, removed a black spot from his heart and washed it with snow from a golden bowl before sewing him back up; elsewhere in the text, however, they are not men but cranes, who emptied beakfuls of ice water into his chest. On occasion, negative stories slipped in, such as the notorious ‘Satanic Verses’ in al-Waqidi and ...”

“... is appropriately Gothic too, a ‘bitter cold’ February day with ‘vicious showers of sleet and snow’. The mourners make their way along the ‘tatters’ of the old, winding road, passing Harry and Gwen Williams’s cottage, where Raymond grew up. Assembled in the churchyard, ‘Raymond’s young men’ (as his wife, Joy, used to call them) are now ...”

“... Convention not quite knowing John Kerry, and not quite liking him either. Heavily supported by Edward Kennedy (and by Bill Clinton since the Wesley Clark machine puffed its last), Kerry is famous for having none of Kennedy’s backslapping, song-singing, law-making brio, and very little of Clinton’s natural empathy and charisma. People noticed ...”

“... was G.M. Trevelyan’s textbook, and his admiring biographies of Lord Grey of the Reform Bill, Sir Edward Grey and John Bright. And there was G.M. Young’s masterly if elusive Portrait of an Age. As Briggs gratefully and graciously acknowledges in two of the essays reprinted here, both of these patriarchs influenced him profoundly: Trevelyan by urging the ...”

“... beautiful comparison to Siamese cats could be the beginning of a poem, as the reference to Edward Hicks’s famous primitive painting suggests, but it didn’t happen. He says – it’s 1955 – that his ‘head is full of ideas for poems, these days, but they vanish as soon as I sit down’. He often asks Monica’s views on his poems and her ...”

“... was working on at the time of his death in the Marquesas Islands was of a Breton church under snow. This wasn’t, by Segalen’s lights, the homesick act of an unhappy man at the end of his tether, but a sovereign gesture of the born traveller, the ‘Exote’ (his coining), caught up in the ‘poised two-way play’ (‘ce double jeu ...”

“... of season four of Mad Men opens in 1964, somewhere in New York State. Luxurious flakes of snow fall on a lot filled with flawless Christmas trees for sale, lit by strings of lights hung from red and white candy-striped poles. The camera swoops on a family of five, husband, wife and three children, arranged in perfect descending height order from left ...”