“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... else could the art historian E.H. Gombrich be transformed by a feat of necromancy into his son Richard, and suddenly appear as ‘a distinguished Orientalist’? What other magical city could induct a wizard of Johnson’s calibre and pack him off to France to discover Jean-Marie Le Pen’s followers celebrating their Welsh origins (‘nos ancêtres les ...”

“... and national cause in Hungary, Poland and Italy. The press presented the war as a defence of ‘English’ ideals – liberalism, constitutionalism and international law – against the Russian bear.There wasn’t much British postwar identification with the Crimea either. It never caught the imagination as a ‘lieu de mémoire’. In her excellent new ...”

“... might just wonder why Cavell doesn’t give up any wish to remain within the profession. But to Richard Rorty’s suggestion that if he finds professional philosophy so bankrupt, then he should give up his quarrel with it, Cavell remarks that one of his tasks is to ‘find philosophy’s loss of itself’. And this means to him that the professionalisation ...”

“... method of reading, which involves the testing of new hypotheses on texts – for example, that the English novel is best understood as an articulation of imperialist conciousness, or the hypothesis that every text undermines its own authority in the play of its figurative language. This mode of experimentalism produces routines and repetitious readings – we ...”

“... the Irving house, to meet the remarkable talking animal. In 1936 he reached the High Court when Richard Lambert, the editor of the Listener, brought an action against Sir Cecil (Lord) Levita, who was reported to have said that Lambert was ‘cracked’ and ‘off his head’ for publicly stating a belief in a mongoose with powers of speech. Lambert was the ...”

“... of Michel Houellebecq’s first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), translated into English under the dismal title Whatever (1998), the nameless protagonist falls into a severe depression. He leaves a note on his desk saying ‘I AM SICK,’ and checks himself into a ‘rest home’. Relations with his psychologist are not easy: She took me to ...”