“... blame him for the enclosures, the flight from the land to the cities and the disappearance of the English peasantry. His son, Lord Townshend said, ran the farming side. Having inherited the title and the estate late in life, just before his 65th birthday, he was focused on the house, which a senior historian at ...”

“... terms of its circulation. It belonged to the era of what Lewis calls the ‘benign monopolies of English life’ – the BBC, the NHS, Penguin paperbacks – as yet unconcerned about ‘low-grade competition from upstart rivals’. The Observer published what it considered to be important and interesting, Lewis says, ‘without having to worry too much about ...”

“... that the voice of her two semi-autobiographical novels – Ma Mère rit (translated into English as My Mother Laughs) and Une famille à Bruxelles (translated as A Family in Brussels) – slips between that of the narrator and that of her mother, often in the same sentence, without a change in pronouns. The mother tongue was already present in one of ...”

“... under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a ...”

“... observations drawn from the most profound knowledge of human nature ... there is perhaps no English prose writer since Bacon whose works are so thickly starred with thought. The time may come when they will be no longer read. The time will never come in which men would not grow the wiser by reading them. It was Lewis Namier who began the work of ...”

“... but also to educate them in new musical trends, and major works by Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Richard Strauss were premiered at the Proms before the First World War. But in the beginning, Wood’s programmes were much less demanding, often consisting of many short items, so as not to bore the audience. This was especially true of the early final ...”

“... A Christmas letter from Cami Elbow, wife of Peter Elbow, an American college friend who teaches English at Amherst: Life in Amherst is very placid. Even grammatically correct. In December the town decided to encourage shoppers to patronise the downtown stores with free parking. They ordered plastic bags to cover up the parking meters but the bags arrived ...”

“... His father, Onyango Obama, was a house servant in Nairobi, where he became obsessed with English ways. A harsh patriarch, he terrorised his wives and children, and intimidated most of the people in the village with his hyper-organised household. Despite his contempt for rural Kenyans’ backwardness, he derided British assumptions of ...”

“... have eclipsed it a bit now, but for a long time the elopement from Wimpole Street was the great English literary romance, and all the more remarkable for the way that so much of it happened in great swathes of impassioned text. After Browning was dead his son brought out an edition of the complete correspondence, to which his father, normally a person of ...”

“... government; a spate of genealogically informed memoirs as part of a broader ethnic revival – Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood: The Problem of Italian Americans, for example, and Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat. Capitalism turned all this into profit, initially through print publication and the rise of professional genealogy services, and on to ...”

“... made his first and only trip to the United States in March 1946, to mark the publication in English of L’Étranger. At 33, he was nearly as well known as his friend Sartre, who had visited New York a year earlier. (That his name always appeared after Sartre’s in discussions of existentialism grated on him, and helps to explain why he was so keen to ...”

“... cross in workshops, but we were in a literature class together, where the visiting professor, Richard Ellmann, had us read our own writing. I had a profound fear of public speaking, but when it was my turn, looking out over the classroom, I saw David and Heather’s faces smiling in encouragement. David in particular seemed like my own personal ...”

“... in doing so. She knew already that she wanted to be a writer and had thought she wanted to study English. From English she turned to classics. Her teachers – particularly Eduard Fraenkel, who taught her Horace and the Agamemnon and led discussions on suffering and violence, and Donald MacKinnon, whose subjects were ...”

“... way, as if we are sifting their souls? I feel as if I’m wearing Wallace’s sweatband. At the English-language bookshop Otherwise, we make friends with the man behind the till, Donato, who poses for a picture while exclaiming: ‘I’m ugly as fuck though!’ He has excellent taste in literature. He gives us a free tote bag. On the back of it is ...”

“... Diop drew a community of black intellectuals, including African Americans like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, to the offices of Présence Africaine. Andrade was working with Césaire on a new edition of his long poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and compiling an anthology of African poetry. In 1956 Diop organised the first Congress of Black Writers ...”