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“... Even the titles of some books – Heat and Dust, for instance – are generalisations. This book, Fanny Eden’s travel journals, wears its title like an uneasy crown: Tigers, Durbars and Kings suggests lazy stereotypes rather than particulars observed by someone alive to their surroundings. The suspicion proves to be ill-founded, however. What the blurb ...”

“... by God. Unlike Eve, who was made from a spare rib, Lilith was made from the same clay as Adam. In Eden, Adam insisted that Lilith lie beneath him during sexual intercourse as an admission of her inferiority. She refused and fled Paradise. Adam complained to God, who sent three angels (angelic heavies, perhaps) to fetch her back; she refused. According to ...”

“... price of that harmony. Do Emma and Mr Knightley, Elizabeth and Darcy, Anne and Captain Wentworth, Fanny and Edmund, represent ideal or merely idealised marriages? Do Austen’s novels foreclose their own vitality by choosing the safety of proper settlements? Are romance and marriage at odds – politically, stylistically, generically? All readers agree that ...”

“... hefty survey of occult British film and television. Young, who wrote the excellent Electric Eden (2010), a history of the British folk-rock movement which was almost contemporaneous with these broadcasts, finds that much of the British film and TV output of this era was born of an obsession with the past as a repository of national mythologies, and ...”

“... in a rage over the household’s careless treatment of a letter from his painfully beloved Fanny Brawne. But he needed to leave in order to spare her the sight of the horrors he knew were coming for him. Severn’s companionship, solicited (though with many reservations about its fitness) and funded by some of the more generous of Keats’s worried but ...”

“... a menagerie of exotic animals, who have since escaped, Nora dreams of creating a new and reversed Eden in Africa, teeming with all species save one. Mallory has made love to her perfunctorily and she is raped by a large but indefinite number of Africans during the course of the novel. None of these experiences reconciles Nora to the male animal. On the fringe ...”

“... amiable parents, three good-looking children, a dog, a cat, a scattering of goldfish’. American Eden. But the younger son, Ian, makes a spiteful remark to his brother Danny, suggesting that Danny’s wife has been unfaithful. Two suicides and the disorder of the apple-pie family result. Paradise lost. The older Bedloes get sick and cranky. The children are ...”

“... of the Flood, a repulsive indication of the partial ruin of the world (there was no sea in Eden, and Revelation promises that there won’t be one after Apocalypse). The shore was where the sea was providentially halted In Classical literature the sea was usually very treacherous, as Horace and Lucretius attest, and of course Odysseus took a long time ...”

“... Calvinist could not actually claim that, but for Eve, Adam would still be in the garden of Eden, but it could be implied. The sacredness of property meant that sexual irregularity was a crime as well as a sin in a woman, a peccadillo in a man of property. In the later 18th century a new line of thought was put forward. Women were finer and purer than ...”

“... His first visit in June of 1766 lasted four months, and the place became for him a kind of Eden, where he could eat to his heart’s content the peaches, grapes and pineapples that grew in the greenhouse. To Hester, Johnson was at once a mentor and ‘a great man-child’, while acting as, in Jackson Bate’s phrase, ‘a combination of friend and a ...”

“... on the road, and she was Groucho’s unhappiest real-life casualty until his wives Ruth, Kay and Eden. His first marriage, to Ruth Johnson, took a long time to unravel. She had fallen in love with his quickness. Closer up, Groucho resembled his on-stage character in ways she found disturbing. He could say ‘I want to be alone,’ in a vaguely Slavic basso ...”

“... by the UK government, which feared revolt in the colonies, but the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, repeated a long-established trope, also used by the War Office during the First World War, when he explained that the climate in Britain ‘was badly suited to negroes’, who might be better off in Italy. Attempts were made by the British government to ...”

“... scene where George, spoilt inheritor of the family, is watched and questioned by his spinster aunt Fanny; the dinner where Eugene Morgan, in love with George’s mother, the last of the Ambersons, sees the truth in a thoughtless insult by George and says that though cars have made his fortune, men may come to think they were something that ‘had no business ...”