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“... Ophelia’s words: ‘By Cock, they are to blame.’ For Hamlet, ‘this loneliest of heroes’ as Philip Edwards calls him in his new edition, there is no evolutionary potential within life, since the appearance of the ghost, whoever he may be, condemns him to death. Delay is where Hamlet lives, if that is not too strong a word, since if his self is to ...”

“... it enhances the components in it, makes them potent by the share they have in the whole oeuvre. Philip Edwards, in his concise little survey of the main canon, argues that it ‘is a unity, and the meaning of each part is enlarged by recognising the unity.’ He cites Muriel Bradbrook in support of this version of Eliot’s argument about the great ...”

“... government which might be found of service. Literature and Nationalism, essays dedicated to Philip Edwards, comes from the university world of literary studies. Though the book spends some time on Shakespeare’s view of the Welsh and Scots, the main emphasis is on Ireland – understandably, given the literary achievement of Irish writers in the ...”

“... In his introduction to Last Voyages Professor Edwards almost apologises for voyages as a form of literature, partly because the New Criticism ignored them; yet he may be battering at an open door, for surely the great mass of readers, who do not give a damn for the New Criticism, have never ceased to agree that ‘these narratives ...”

“... It always comes as something of a surprise to remember that thirty years before the Armada, Philip of Spain was king of the country he later attempted to invade. What was more, he had been a new kind of king, the consort of England’s first ruling queen, and one to whom England had violently objected before he had even set foot there ...”

“... In the summer of 1618, Diego Sarmiento de Acuna, Count of Gondomar, Ambassador of Philip III to the Court of James I had a clever idea. For four years the proposal that James’s son Prince Charles should marry the Infanta Maria had been batted to and fro between London and Madrid in an attempt to bring about an Anglo-Spanish alliance ...”

“... been deleted altogether. Are modern times really so terrible?If The Soaring Pilot was our bible, Philip Wills was our bard. That remarkable man had started gliding in 1933 (how close to the Wright brothers that is beginning to seem!), and by 1939 had not only established himself as the leading British pilot, but had shown in those few years that it was ...”

“... as one of the five best movies ever made; it starred John Wayne, as the Indian-hating Ethan Edwards. John Wayne casts his shadow over far more than Orange County and Hollywood. Eric Bentley, the Brecht scholar and editor of a volume of testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, has called John Wayne ‘the most important American of ...”

“... the performers, but may find the performers watching them. In the Sixties, Eric Sykes and Jimmy Edwards were doing something like this in a ground-breaking show called Big Bad Mouse, only without the frocks. At the time, we laughed over the dismantling of theatrical conventions, but through the lens of Post-Modernism we can see that something more ...”

“... with a country beyond the sea, or rather a dynasty beyond the sea. She married Charles’s son Philip, and once she was married she was desperate to secure a Catholic future by having his child. That child might with the right quirks of genealogy have ruled half the known world, and a good deal of it not then known: an empire combining Spanish and ...”

“... The current controversy over the Ridolphi Plot was initiated by the Jesuit historian Francis Edwards, who published a reconstruction of it, The Marvellous Chance, in 1968. Edwards claimed that Ridolphi was an English double agent employed by Cecil to entrap Mary and Norfolk. He went on to argue, in Plots and Plotters ...”

“... two children. His sole surviving daughter, Frances, married the poet and Protestant courtier Sir Philip Sidney. Cooper acknowledges the problems these gaps in the record pose to a biographer, but doesn’t shy away from sifting Walsingham’s motives and gauging the nature and depth of his religious beliefs. For Cooper, Walsingham is a man of principle ...”

“... Poetry and Poets, ‘can a book of criticism be at once so distinguished and so unimportant?’ Of Philip Larkin’s comparable and incomparable ‘miscellaneous pieces’, it might be asked: How can a book of criticism be at once so un-‘distinguished’ and so important? But then how can this Faber book of groans be so exhilarating? The open unsecret is: by ...”

“... the genitalia and disguising ‘signs of arousal, incontinence and menstruation’, as Nina Edwards writes in The Virtues of Underwear (Reaktion, £20). Because of its proximity to intimate areas, sites of shame or transgression, it comes with heavy cultural baggage. In Chaucer’s ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’, the sight of the Pardoner’s trousers is ...”

“... creation. In Articles 50 and 51 of Magna Carta, the barons promise to remove from the kingdom Philip Marc, the sheriff of Nottingham, and his kinsmen, along with all other alien knights ‘who have come with horses and arms to the harm of the kingdom’.This slotted into the longstanding resentment against Henry’s fondness for his foreign ...”