“... All Oxford and Cambridge colleges, many ‘redbrick’ universities and most of the celebrated North American universities began with private endowments. Many of our professorships, laboratories and libraries owe a similar debt to private benefaction. There is nothing new in a diversity of sources for a university’s central fund. It is certainly not an ...”

“... instance, with Lewis and Clark. Coleridge himself stipulated that a poet must have ‘the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the forest’. Then there is a very personal judgment of Holmes’s, tucked away in a note: ‘Coleridge’s version of the emigration scheme has, at times, almost a Science ...”

“... nose as a souvenir. It happens that I have written a play about Caracalla’s behaviour in North Britain, so I decided that if I was forced to read verse, I would declaim to the Arabs a song from my play in which Caracalla praises Alexander. Near the ancient arch is a modern monument, a ‘panorama’ set in a high tower, looking like a ...”

“... with the street-poetry of dialect words – yagach, faffing – and the shared pavements of the North. His special tone arises, I think, from his sense of gallantry which makes an accepted claim upon him but which the conditions of his life haven’t allowed him to sustain for long. This sense of unaffordable values appears in the poems from time to time as ...”

“... these folk were Europeans. One wouldn’t want to see them come to harm. Stansted’s a long way north of New Orleans. But dash it all, eh what! What a kerfuffle Just to sort out some minor tribal scuffle! It seems these hijack chappies hate Nyerere And think that Stansted’s the best place to say it. The SAS are on tap looking scarey, A mighty strong ...”

“... hard to get the Church’s permission to enter. Trinity wanted to maintain its connection with the North, since it meant a connection to Britain. And they made a particular virtue out of the circumstance that a fairly large number of foreign students, for whatever reason, came to Dublin. When I taught at University College, I felt some resentment toward ...”

“... from the inside (Healy lives in County Sligo, which is within hailing distance of the North) but a good deal more cold-eyed than anything one would expect to find in the work of Sebastian Barry. Like Jack Ferris, the drunken protagonist of A Goat’s Song, Ireland binged for a few euphoric years, then woke up with an almighty hangover. The ...”

“... admiration for D.H. Lawrence as well as Hitler, Bradford has brought himself up to speed on John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). Not liking modernism and not wanting to be taken for poncy literary types were Amis-Larkin stances too, and proudly despising Beckett, in particular, is an Amis family tradition. (Kingsley to Larkin in ...”

“... intermittently. There were two main flashpoints: the perpetually war-torn Italian peninsula, and North-West Europe. Over the years, the struggle between England, France and the Habsburg Low Countries had led to a series of shifting alliances, and both Habsburg and French agents were active in England, seeking to pull sympathies one way or the other. United ...”

“... The daddy in question, a brooding outdoorsman and occasional builder and handyman, is called John, but Daniel and Cathy always call him Daddy, which amuses their landlord’s arrogant son as much as their mode of dress and their way of life do. The motherless family is squatting in a hand-built house on land in ...”

“... saw British expeditions revert to throwing lives away in ill-provisioned attempts to find the North-West Passage, ultimately for mercantile but also for strategic reasons: to prevent such a passage falling beneath foreign control. The relevance of all this to Mars may be tangential, in a century’s time maybe not. An age might have to elapse before there ...”

“... It also takes Ozick a lot of literature to produce a little literature. As much as Borges or John Barth, she is a metafictional author: her subject is books and writers; obsessive readers, people driven to distraction by fiction. Lars Andemening, the protagonist of her third novel, The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), is an orphaned Swedish book reviewer who ...”

“... douched, frozen, pilled, potioned, lotioned, salivated … by Act of Parliament?’ blustered John Gibbs, hydropath and teetotaller, in a pamphlet denouncing the act. The anti-vaccination movement was born. It was, initially, little more than a collection of outraged scribblers: the 1853 Act was easily evaded and Poor Law Unions, which had quite enough to ...”

“... a creaking gate; it always has fairly serious crises without them being terminal.’ He points to North Sea oil as the kind of unanticipated stroke of fortune that has again and again come to England’s aid. John Bull had his drawbacks as a national symbol, but surely Mr Micawber is no improvement. ‘We inhabit as golden ...”

“... Brigade. In recent years there has been a conservative revival, apparent in the reappearance of John Buchan on the shelves, or the clean-cut manly values of Chariots of Fire. Churchill is modish again, and all the more so after the Falklands. Those who followed Southern Television’s series about the Churchill of the 1930s will recognise the extent to ...”