“... Twice in my lifetime, Quebec referendums have brought the country to the verge of breaking up, and English-speaking Canadians accept that a loose, unassertive confederation is the best way of keeping the country together. Last summer, the discovery of human remains – the bodies of children who died after being removed from their parents – on the grounds of ...”

“... level with the motorway, is the interchange of the M8 and the M74, which leads eventually to the English border. The interchange is one of the city’s largest structures, and as you poke around – mostly alone – you get a sense of what a grand public project this was, how generously landscaped, if now rather neglected. Heading east underneath the ...”

“... And as schools of war, the Unions are unexcelled. In them is developed the peculiar courage of the English. Some strange allusions yet some familiar resonances in the conclusions of the young Friedrich Engels after his first eventful contact with the labour movement in Lancashire at the height of the second Chartist upsurge. His diagnosis of a close nexus ...”

“... his release from prison in 1930: entitled Die Geächteten (‘the ostracised’, published in English translation shortly afterwards as The Outlaws), it was an unapologetic glorification of the violent and extreme nationalism from which these young men drew inspiration. The killing sent a shockwave through the fledgling Weimar Republic. In the subsequent ...”

“... so very irrelevant. The renewal of interest was signalled by the publication in 1996 of a revised, English-language edition of Bley’s now classic work, as Namibia under German Rule. Monographs and articles began to appear on colonialist discourse in Germany, on the colonial origins of racial science and on representations of colonial subjects in ...”

“... officers and soldiers, engineers, armaments specialists and other professionals to join him on English territory. The Free French army was intended to be a conventional military force, located in England, where it would prepare for the invasion of the Continent. De Gaulle did nothing to help the French who remained at home wage a guerrilla war, engage in ...”

“... disappears when you look inward. The chaos within is one of the major themes in the fiction of Richard Ford. What engages him is the churning of the conscious self, as changeable as the weather on an iffy day. What kind of a day is such a day? Soft or threatening? What kind of people were Ford’s mother and father, whose inner lives might offer strong ...”

“... Richard Hoggart​ made much in his writings of the scholarship child’s uprootedness and anxiety, but his own dislocation had its limits. Although he went from a primary school in a poor part of Leeds to grammar school and on to university, Hoggart never really made what the novelist Storm Jameson, a generation ahead of him at the University of Leeds, called the ‘journey from the North ...”

“... its serpentine kinship structures seem destined – if not designed – to undermine linear English certainties. The major political upheaval of the 14th century had, after all, reached its climax in Wales. In the summer of 1399, the shattering deposition of Richard II, the ultimate de jure monarch of the old medieval ...”

“... British Consulate in Florence on 29 September 1913, a Monday. According to his death certificate, Richard Roberts, a 67-year-old Justice of the Peace and builder, staying at the Hotel Londres & Métropole in Florence, died at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova on Saturday, 27 September 1913. The consul, Alfred Lemon, was informed of the death by R. Ellis ...”

“... Walking along the main street of Farnham one afternoon, Richard Hoggart was accosted by a drunk. He didn’t ask for money or spit ill-focused abuse. ‘I know who you are,’ he slurred, ‘and I’ve got one question for you. Who’s the better writer, you or Raymond Williams?’ Reading this, I found I was disappointed that the level of literary criticism among Farnham’s drunks was so low ...”

“... The best thing on Stendhal in English is an essay by Lytton Strachey in which he remarks the way the author denovelises the novel while skilfully retaining all its traditional apparatus. Stendhal’s imagination is a kind of parody of Scott’s: his sensibility is itself its own journal and his own memoir. Reviewing Stendhal’s last book, The Charterhouse of Parma, when it appeared in 1839, Balzac noted admiringly that the novel ‘often contained a whole book in a single page ...”

“... A few servants managed to reach a port and sneak back to England, resulting in lawsuits in the English courts, but escape required nerve, stamina and luck. Watchful householders would raise the alarm, and recapture had dreadful consequences. Flight was punishable by flogging or, even worse, extension of the term of service.In the 17th century the typical ...”

“... Cosima von Bülow (née Liszt) met the composer Richard Wagner briefly in 1853, lived with him from 1864, bearing three children, and married him in 1870. She was a devoted wife, who put up with every whim and eccentricity of a being she acknowledged as the embodiment of genius: she had married her first husband after she had heard him conducting the overture to Tannhäuser and realised that genius needed genius to interpret it: in her relation with Richard she was to display her own genius too ...”

“... al. She seems no less expert with the Yiddish of an older master, Sholom Aleichem, best-known to English readers as the chronicler of the Jewish poor in the shtetl of the 1880s, the low-life, high-thinking world of Fiddler on the Roof. The world of Marienbad, in 1911, is more classy and farcical: plenty of high life and low thinking. The Bohemian holiday ...”