“... seemingly vacuuming the altar. It’s the bats, he explains, the church disputed territory between English Heritage, who want them expelled, and English Nature, who don’t. In the meantime he hoovers. The opening concert was shot in the Double Cube room at Wilton House, where the hand-bell ringers perform their somnolent ...”

“... and assign him to his place.’ In a marvellous vignette, Lamb makes a ‘sentiment’ – an English lord’s wish to be buried at a ‘pretty green spot’ in Geneva – a tangible object and shows how idle notions lose their charm when carried into practice. It is ‘boarded up, freighted … hoisted into a ship’, ‘pawed about’ by ...”

“... existentialist you ever saw’ and she lunched her way around Manhattan, becoming close to Richard Wright and his wife, Ellen (left-wing Americans who criticised their country in a way that made you love it more), before taking off for Vassar, then Chicago, California, Texas, New Orleans and New Mexico.She’d been told to look up Nelson Algren when ...”

“... severe hardship, including periods of solitary confinement. Serving a lengthy prison sentence in English jails would give him the sort of mystique that arose from having sacrificed much for Ireland and survived. It would place him in the long tradition of Irish martyrs and put him in a position of leadership in Dublin once the time came. In prison, he ...”

“... The Thames underwrites a narrative of royal escapes, murdered princelings, futile rebellion. Richard II is rowed downstream to confront Wat Tyler and his peasant army. Unable to call on anything as formidable as the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step ashore. ‘Rough, rude men’ had been sent ‘all over the ...”

“... the war on terror; Israelis who descend from survivors of one holocaust are now creating another.Richard Beck’s Homeland supplies abundant matter for contemplation. He deftly reconstructs the coup d’état that unfolded in the corridors of power after 9/11, but also explores the darker reaches of the American psyche: the vicarious sadism; the Manichean ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... unethical as that was especially at postgraduate level, where foreign applicants with very poor English were being invited to spend large sums on degrees … Huge administrative duties were often announced with deadlines for completion only a few days later. We had to spend hours filling in time-and-motion forms to prove we weren’t bunking off when we ...”

“... of German Writers in New York in 1939, and published in Moscow that same year – ended with four English words: ‘The Rights of Man’. Unlike Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and their colleagues from the Hegelian-Marxist Frankfurt School, Bloch arrived in the United States without clear prospects of a post, and predictably failed to find one. After two years ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”