“... had vanished: ‘Now expect Peace Congress which big four control will do nothing [for Ireland] if English oppose. Also expect League of Nations Scheme will exclude probability of successful appeal there.’ Another equally unrealistic hope temporarily replaced the earlier optimism about the Peace Conference – that Britain might ‘offer [the US] President ...”

“... to spring a trap in our minds. ‘Rural England is where urban England now dumps its rubbish,’ Richard Girling writes. ‘Here it tips everything from garbage in landfills to fridges in ponds, broken cars and surplus people.’1 The Daily Mail says there is a plague of rats in Britain as a result of the lack of care taken in refuse collection. The ...”

“... at several schools and colleges, and this volume ends just as he is resigning as professor of English at Amherst. He enjoys offering sage counsel, and he’s good at it too (his letter to his daughter about how to write an essay is the best thing I’ve read on that ticklish subject). Having said that, he is also aware of his tendency to gravitate towards ...”

“... finds a shed skin, as long as a child is tall; Arne hears a cat sing ‘Watch the sunrise’ in English. The dry rattle of the sound kalikalikalikalik clicks through the text. The plagues progress to human sacrifice: an extreme death-metal band is found murdered in the woods in what appears to be a ritual killing. The sexy journalist, Jostein, races to the ...”

“... her to the attention of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds ...”

“... I noticed that the lakeside venue supplied free coffee to customers brave enough to purchase ‘an English muffin’. GET IT DONE. Beyond the underpass with the satiric graffito of Boris Johnson shovelling shit for St Patrick’s Day, I crossed a set of ancient tracks, the Thamesmead Ridgeway and the Green Chain Walk. Here was the first indication I had ...”

“... professor; he had been a friend of Wagner’s and parties in the house were attended by Mahler and Richard Strauss. ‘One has no thought of Jewishness in regard to these people,’ Thomas wrote to his brother, ‘one senses only culture.’ Once married, Thomas and Katia Mann lived in splendour in Munich. ‘The Manns,’ Reich-Ranicki wrote, ‘would go to ...”

“... move, part of a Saudi-UAE effort to counter what they present as Iranian influence. As Richard Sokolsky and Aaron David Miller put it in an article for Politico, The crown prince engineered this dispute not to punish Qatar for its financing of terrorism (a hypocritical comment coming from the Saudis, whose own citizens have provided funding to ...”

“... flannels’ – but are also exemplars of British understatement, and peppered with English schoolboy slang: ‘awfully’, ‘topping’, ‘top hole’. He was born in San Francisco on 2 August 1897; his parents were Josephine Harker Fernald and Chester Bailey Fernald, a popular playwright. Chester could write anywhere, so the family moved ...”

“... blankets, sang a refrain: ‘There is hunger in Palestine/there is no hunger in Palestine.’ Richard Cook, a director at UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Administration, said to Azoulay that arbitrary, banal impediments to food supplies were jeopardising the nutritional health of many Palestinians.After 7 October 2023, the Israeli government narrowed its ...”

“... is condemned by the Koran and there is no room for interpretation.’ When it was discovered that Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was a British Muslim, more than a hundred mosques and Islamic centres were visited by the police. ‘Do you have any relations with the Taliban?’ was one opening gambit used to win over law-abiding Muslims to the cause of the ...”

“... one which invariably resembled his own.’ He receives an A+ in Lionel Trilling’s course on the English Romantics, literary criticism’s closest thing to a baptism of the holy spirit. From Columbia, Podhoretz, destined for distinction in the finest dojos of literary training, continues his studies at Cambridge, where the fearsome F.R. Leavis and his ...”

“... head, which is empirically false. On the other hand, it only re-creates the same difficulty when Richard Dawkins goes to the other extreme and, having dismissed Wynne-Edwards more or less out of hand in favour of genes as the units of natural selection, identifies the unit of social selection as any item of cultural transmission capable of replication, from ...”

“... at risk is us. The reason for that is that in the UK bank assets are 492 per cent of GDP. In plain English, our banks are five times bigger than our entire economy. (When the Icelandic and Cypriot banking systems collapsed the respective figures were 880 and 700 per cent.) We know from the events of 2008 and subsequently that the financial sector, indeed the ...”

“... The habit of sodomy was often supposed to have been acquired from foreigners. ‘Buggery’, the English legal term, derives from ‘Bulgar’, referring to Bulgarian Bogomil heretics, who were accused of elaborate and obscene sexual practices. Sodom could be much closer to home, however, and for much of early modernity Italy was a byword for the unspeakable ...”