“... but is Jill still around? Where’s Shula? What’s with Eddie Grundy? Old Walter Gabriel must be long gone, but what happened to his scapegrace son, Nelson? Are the village shop and post office still open, or does everyone in Ambridge have to drive to Borchester to shop at Tesco? Is The Bull now part of the portfolio of Punch Taverns plc? I ask these ...”

“... There’s just something about a schlump. Or rather, there must be, otherwise we American male novelists wouldn’t keep writing books about them. Let us observe Jonathan Franzen’s latest, in which the eco-maniacal egghead, at long last, gets the girl. Or Jonathan Lethem’s stoned underachievers, with their mad ideas that turn out to be right ...”

“... Numbers​ 130 and 131 Fleet Street are today occupied by a branch of the sushi chain Itsu and one of Jeeves (‘London’s Finest Dry Cleaners’), but in 1501 this was Wynkyn de Worde’s home and printing house: he rented a former inn for £3 6s 8d a year from a priory in Buckinghamshire. De Worde would have looked out at the cistern house of the Fleet River; on a weekday morning now, the glass and chrome of Shoe Lane is full of suited twentysomethings ...”

“... was just too leaden-eyed, leaden-headed to appreciate late Turner, not at all the right person to be writing this review. ‘Out of the ashes of this Götterdämmerung,’ wrote the scourge of the poppies, Jonathan Jones, of his own exit from the exhibition, ‘I crawled away exhausted, wrecked, into the empty light of the modern world.’ Wow. That is some ...”

“... 1940-41 when Butterfield himself succumbed to Whiggery in The Englishman and His History (1944). By the 1960s, however, the Whig interpretation had lost its potency, though no subsequent idea of Englishness has proved anything like as successful. Rather than the understated influence of Whig historians Englishness is now a matter of the shrill nativism of a ...”

“... but this will not work to the advantage of the average person unless science outpaces law. By understanding the mechanisms through which our privacy is violated, we can win here … In the end, we must enforce a principle whereby the only way the powerful may enjoy privacy is when it is the same kind shared by the ...”

“... I recently​ took part in a research project prompted by the government-sponsored campaign of 2013, when Theresa May was home secretary, in which vans carried billboards bearing the words ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.’ In order to understand how such a thing as that billboard could have come about, we felt we needed some insight into the mindset of the Home Office and its officials ...”

“... Who​ invented English literature? English literature, that is, as a conceptual category defined by canon and tradition? The 18th century has provided most of the candidates. There were opinion formers like Joseph Addison, who airbrushed out Milton’s regicidal politics, or David Garrick, who turned Shakespeare from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry anthologies cashed in on the landmark case of Donaldson v ...”

“... theme links the books discussed here, it is the victory of the ‘common man’ – as represented by English and Welsh archers – on the battlefield of Agincourt, over the chivalric aristocracy of France. The ‘dirty work’ – and it was very dirty – was done by them. They unleashed volleys of arrows, slaughtered ...”

“... your voice hoarse. Oh, we Who wanted to prepare the land for friendliness Could not ourselves be friendly‘Could not be friendly’ is a discreet but painful understatement, a too amiable hint at horrors. Dark times mean not only that terrible things happen to the world and to us but also that we have had a hand in the ...”

“... union is in trouble. But this time the problem needs a new question. Forget: ‘Should Scotland be independent?’ The Scots will take care of that. Ask instead: ‘Who in the rest of Britain needs this union with Scotland? And why?’ Through the long Covid months, it was only England that Boris spoke for, and spoke to, at those teatime briefings from ...”

“... on their sides. And the colour. Imagine the softest pencil you could find – I guess that would be a 10B. Now imagine really bearing down with it and blacking out two little circles. The persistence of these images is as interesting as the images themselves. In novels by women, novels I might call feminist, there are ...”

“... 22 August 1566, a crowd gathered in the town of ’s-Hertogenbosch to listen to an open air sermon by an itinerant Protestant preacher. Afterwards they rushed from church to church, singing psalms and smashing images. Two days later, the reformers held their first sermon in the town cathedral, now purified of the paintings and statues they believed tempted ...”

“... Why should​ poets’ deaths carry more weight than those of others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and expands to commemorate, in laconic sentences and judicious fragments, the deaths (sprinkled with quotes and quirks) of novelists, painters, composers, philosophers ...”

“... At​ the Battle of Shrewsbury, in 1403, the 16-year-old Prince of Wales was hit in the face by an arrow. It was not a glancing blow. The bolt pierced his cheek to a depth of six inches, miraculously missing the brain and major blood vessels, but sticking fast in the back of the skull, whence it had to be removed with specially made pincers by a London surgeon ...”