“... King’s College, London. His first book, a history of the Coldstream Guards written jointly with John Sparrow, was published in 1951. And there you have Michael Howard. Though he has grown in fame and distinction, and moved in governing circles on both sides of the Atlantic, and held four chairs including the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford ...”

“... villages. In The Pilgrimage, first published in 1961 and recently reissued by McNally Editions, John Broderick writes that ‘the city dweller who passes through a country town and imagines it as sleepy and apathetic is very far from the truth: it is as watchful as the jungle.’ Broderick was born in Athlone in 1924. The Irish Midlands has few spectacular ...”

“... great credit to the publishers. This particular essay has provoked in another attentive reader, John Lucas (LRB, Vol. 5, No 20), the reflection that ‘language cannot be innocent.’ But surely it needs to be remarked that whereas indeed the British English that Hill and Lucas share cannot be in this sense ‘innocent’, that doesn’t necessarily hold ...”

“... Alexie’s characters know more about basketball and Hollywood, heavy metal and Hank Williams, than they do about buffalo. His young men might believe that they’re supposed to be warriors, but most of them know that’s a hopeless fantasy. Instead they are unemployed, or in prison, or alcoholic, or driving a truck. Alexie’s first novel and ...”

“... the accompanying turf wars that claim so many academic casualties. He has written biographies of John Winthrop, Ezra Stiles, Roger Williams and George Washington; political histories of the Stamp Act crisis and the causes of the American Revolution; social histories of family life in colonial New England and ...”

“... character’ of language. That phrase comes in the title of a deeply representative book by John Wilkins. It is altogether fitting that a leading figure in the Royal Society should have been preoccupied by such inquiries. One recalls that in the Grand Academy of Lagado the mechanical operation of words figures more largely than experiments with mice ...”

“... teaching in schools, in the Leavis manner, via pairings of admirable against deplorable texts: John Clare compared with ‘a film song’; Mark Twain versus a shampoo advertisement; but also Donne versus Shelley. Because he founded his literary criticism on social criticism, deploring the effects of industrialisation in the 19th century and commodity ...”

“... not a civil one, however, and carries a term of imprisonment.The Conservative minister Lady Williams told the House of Lords that these provisions were aimed at ‘the sorts of tactic we saw from Insulate Britain last autumn’ (when they blocked the M25 and other major roads). We can trust the police to enforce them proportionately, she ...”

“... own essay in defence of Kipling. Hitchens lines up the most formidable detractors (Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Conor Cruise O’Brien), quotes them fairly and at length, and then demolishes them. He even follows Orwell’s injunction that a writer should be particularly severe with the work of his friends (in this case, Said). After that he has the ...”

“... and a few dons. It’s sentimental, don’t you know? and neither Hill, nor Thompson, plodding Williams or doggy Foot can swing the people. Whoever’s heard of Despard, Plug, or Captain Ludd? – dumped in Burford Churchyard bee thoi oll. No, we must lie down and let the Tebbit knock us through the ground. He’s got the goods, as Clive would say – the ...”

“... unimpeded, in particular, by other people. Some thinkers, such as Hobbes and, some of the time, John Stuart Mill, think that this is the conception of freedom, and that it contains all that one knows or needs to know about its value. But this is to identify the seed and the plant, or the rhythm and the dance; it does not get us very far in answering ...”

“... incongruous inner ring of like-minded persons, including Tolkien, a Catholic convert, and Charles Williams, a Cockney original with a decidedly creepy inner life, and an extraordinary talent for updating the mystico-religious poetic attitudes of the Fin-de-Siècle. Thus was born the Inklings, an unexclusive but very characteristic group of like-minded ...”

“... off far better than the single excursion beyond letters. In this batch it is the excellence of John Barrell’s Poetry, Language and Politics which stands out, providing some compensatory cover for the shortcomings of its companion volumes. Barrell’s fine study of language and power in English poetry takes issue with the enduring assumptions of ...”

“... and so on. ‘The old school tie counted even more in Labour than in Conservative circles,’ John Colville observed. Despite the book’s title, he was anything but ‘the inevitable prime minister’. It isn’t just a matter of his undoubted conservatism on the matters listed above. After Oxford he had started to train as a lawyer but got distracted by ...”

“... of ‘Good old Toyners’: later he was fined a pound by the Party. The Cambridge of John Cornford would have regarded such frivolity as monstrous.) He was consistently irresponsible and enjoyed, rather than feared, the thunderbolts that followed. In Brussels in 1945 he used to dress up as a padre in battle-dress and dog-collar: but Miss Mitford ...”