“... to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government. Condorcet foresaw endless social progress, an egalitarian society in which technological advance would provide for an ...”

“... the balancing, divided attitude. Hughes, it’s clear, is the most important writer to emerge from English Nonconformism since Lawrence. Like him Hughes writes to the moment with a voracious intensity. Yet in an unusually assured comment on the Anglican Swift (he was only 22) he tells Olwyn that Swift is the ‘only stylist’. Swift’s excellence is a talent ...”

“... left isn’t new. In 1924, the Independent Labour Party MP James Maxton spoke of turning ‘the English-ridden, capitalist-ridden, landlord-ridden Scotland into a Scottish socialist commonwealth’. In 1968, Tom Nairn criticised the ‘common myth of Scottish left-ness’, arguing that although Scotland was ‘certainly a more egalitarian country than ...”

“... Ofsted talks of settled classrooms and excellent teachers. It helps that they have something English state schools generally lack: private money to supplement falling public funding for music, sport and other extra-curricular activities. Marshall, who has written of the importance of ‘investment in education to enable everyone to participate in the ...”

“... rawness and ugliness of modern European life’. Instead he loved the trees and hedgerows of the English Midlands he had known as a boy, and the tales of ‘little, ultimate creatures’ he came across in the legends of the North. Clue: it wasn’t D.H. Lawrence.A writer, born around 1890, worked bits of ancient writings into his own massive ...”

“... ban on children going to the cinema on Sundays) exemplifies the state of torpor into which English public law had descended by 1948. The reasons for the decline are still little explored. It can be seen setting in at the time of the Great War, partly no doubt because of a sense that to challenge government in a time of crisis would be unpatriotic, but ...”

“... Caroline Kennedy (Schlossberg) was there. The Pete Gurneys, daughter a graduate of the Yale English school, now a financial officer at the ad agency whose long name still ends in Benton and Bowles. That little rat, Jerzy R. Kosinski, thought Conrad was a good subject to bring up with him, but it didn’t interest him very much. All the while, host Bill ...”

“... country, but makes clear that this is just as damaging to Londoners. The ‘concentration of all English politics in London has meant the disappearance of London politics’, he writes, eclipsed by Westminster’s dubious glamour and aided by London’s byzantine accretions of government bodies at borough and city level, with its only newspaper, the Evening ...”

“... innermost circle of the school’. However, as Peter Campbell wrote in the LRB (3 February 2011), English painters ‘responded to Impressionism’s escape from the academic into the everyday, but made something tighter and darker of it. The French pleasure in picnics and river parties and weather wasn’t naturalised here.’ It wasn’t impossible to do ...”

“... may have discussed poetry. Both men were protégés of Norman Holmes Pearson, an instructor in the English department at Yale. Pearson was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his pupil, who had taken his own life earlier in 1950 under a cloud of threats over his leftist leanings and ...”

“... He had flu and had lost his voice, but he didn’t let that put him off. He arranged to have Richard Wollheim read his paper out for him. As the paper was mellifluously read, in cadences quite unlike Freddie’s own clipped and headlong mode of speech (‘prshn’ for ‘proposition’), he nodded his vigorous assent to the arguments that were being ...”

“... the reader is reminded of theories, now abandoned, giving a whirlwind rate of replacement of the English aristocracy in the 15th century. Nor is it as easy as it seems to avoid, or to use, anecdotal evidence and ‘the collection of stray items from diverse sources’. Garnsey and Saller think it likely that young men, even those in their ...”

“... of the new, no doubt, but mired still in the tradition they thought to displace. Interest in the English 1890s has naturally been growing of late. Richard Ellmann’s biography looked forward, emphasising the importance of Wilde as the martyred prophet of a new dispensation. Others have preferred to look back, finding in ...”

“... it must lie elsewhere. Between Facts and Norms, out in German since 1992 but newly translated into English, seeks to justify neutrality by a different route: through the conditions which make public political discourse possible. Faktizität und Geltung, the book’s German title, is none too helpfully rendered by Between Facts and Norms, since one of ...”

“... German theatres and knew something of what Edmund Tracey and Nicholas John had been doing at the English National Opera. No one did that kind of thing at Covent Garden, and the mail I received suggested that others, too, thought it was high time they started. Those in the House were less certain. An opera house is a trade and craft-orientated place in which ...”