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“... family annuities expired. He so inhabited his dour poetic persona that his friend and publisher Edward Hookham, writing to the Literary Fund, ‘had but too just reason to dread that the Fate of Chatterton might be that of Peacock’. The committee awarded him £30. Numerous failed courtships intensified the gloom. Peacock was, his cousin remembered, ‘a ...”

“... that there was anything very equitable about his dealings with them. As the Jacobean diplomat Sir Edward Hoby observed, it was ‘lawful for a Christian to take away anything from infidels’. Pynchon was a restless man and six years after his arrival in America he headed a group of settlers who moved from Massachusetts Bay to a new site. Formerly the home ...”

“... adapted through the centuries when most Tudor music was relegated to the archives.2 Beside him are Thomas Sackville, earl of Dorset, and the earls and cousins Charles and Henry Howard. All three were Byrd’s patrons, and to various degrees shared the shifts and ambiguities of his religious convictions; it was odds-on that all of them would have conformed to a ...”

“... of Enfield, Catherine of Lincoln, Maud of Canterbury, John Machon, Alyse Darcy, Alice Catour and Thomas Bell could be added those of Alexius and Andronicus Effomatus, Greek ‘workers of damask gold’ (drawn gold wire) in London; John of Cologne, a German immigrant working for Edward III in the 1330s; Giles Avenel of ...”

“... E.P. Thompson, historian and peacemaker, known as Edward to his friends, died at his home near Worcester in 1993. Four years on, Beyond the Frontier is a volume of material set aside far earlier. Indeed, there occurs in it a passing reference to ‘the raw material for half-finished books on William Blake and Customs in Common’, works long since published ...”

“... Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Georg Simmel, Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Jaspers, Max Weber, Paul Ernst and Thomas Mann. By interweaving, in chronological sequence, letters written by Lukacs with letters he received, this collection draws the strands of his early life together into a variegated pattern. Lukacs was brought up bilingually, and approximately half of these ...”

“... It could only have been written by an author who had tested his resources many times before. Hugh Thomas’s Havannah is a very different kind of achievement. Here is an accomplished writer actually changing harness, and exchanging the sober caparison of the historian for the showier trappings of the historical novelist. In his capacity as Lord ...”

“... of her study are the 1831 and Morant Bay rebellions, which made Jamaica’s repressive proconsul, Edward Eyre, a colonial cause célèbre, much as Warren Hastings had been seventy years earlier. She borrows creatively from Stuart Hall’s distinction between ‘cultural differentialism’ and ‘biological racism’, allowing her to examine gender, sexual ...”

“... the creation, he was there soon enough: for breakfast the next day. I went up in the elevator with Edward Jay Epstein, once a conspiracy theorist on the Kennedy assassination and a party-giver at his Upper East Side apartment, and we walked into what used to be an artist’s studio. Drinks, canapés, hello, your name is, I’m Inigo, what, Inigo who’s ...”

“... of names and places are buzzing around: the 17th-century antiquarian was William Dugdale, not Thomas; the early Victorian author of The Mansions of England in the Olden Time was the artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was ...”

“... with strong smells tended to breed acceptance or even dependence. The Elizabethan entomologist Thomas Muffet (now remembered only for his daughter’s encounter with a spider) told the story of a man who used to clean privies entering an apothecary’s shop in Antwerp. He smelled the spices and promptly fainted. Fortunately, a bystander rushed ...”

“... had already proved impossible: in 1553, the last year of the reign of Elizabeth’s brother, Edward VI, an English expedition had tried to sail to China round the north of Russia. Most of the sailors froze to death near present-day Murmansk, but some of them made it to Moscow, where they struck a trade deal with Ivan the Terrible – nearly as good as a ...”

“... These two paperbacks, of Geoffroi de Charny’s A Knight’s Own Book of Chivalry and Edward, Duke of York’s The Master of Game, make accessible two texts that are of exceptional interest for the light they shed on the ethos, style and tastes of the secular aristocracy of the later Middle Ages. Charny’s book offers an exploration and explanation of the values and proper manner of life for Christian knights and men at arms by someone who was a knight himself ...”

“... two ornaments and some textura fonts from John Herford. And a small number of sheets printed by Thomas Berthelet and Thomas Godfray around 1536 feature what Blayney calls ‘disoriented 4s’ – ‘whoever struck the matrix from which the 4 was cast did so with the punch rotated ninety degrees anticlockwise from its ...”

“... the longed-for past almost certainly didn’t feel as wonderful at the time as it does in memory. Edward Manners, aesthete and voyeur, the splendidly creepy narrator of Hollinghurst’s second novel, The Folding Star (1994), is infatuated with his 17-year-old pupil, in love largely with the memory of being 17 himself. The Swimming Pool Library is elegiac not ...”