“... That the English have been slow to recognise James Merrill as the best poet in the language after Elizabeth Bishop has long seemed strange to Americans. Come to think of it, British recognition of Bishop herself was belated; for decades she was upstaged by Robert Lowell, probably because he lived in England and behaved in a way that seemed more certifiably poetic ...”

“... In​ 1944, as Richard Kay records, an optimistic litigant challenged the validity of a Victorian statute under which he was being sued, on the ground that Queen Victoria, like all her predecessors since 1689, had had no title to the throne. The argument, which would have wiped the statute book almost clean, was dismissed without much ceremony; but in 1688 and 1689 it occupied the centre of the political and constitutional stage ...”

“... places the burden of compassion on the reader. It didn’t happen that way. In his introduction Richard Pevear makes the case that Russia’s liberal intelligentsia mistakenly labelled Leskov a reactionary on the basis of a carelessly worded editorial he wrote in the Northern Bee in 1862, seemingly linking radicals to a spate of suspicious fires in St ...”

“... Charles Doyle’s biography of Richard Aldington opens so readily at the 24 excellent photographs with which the book is illustrated that the temptation to look at them, before one gets involved with the text, is irresistible. The series starts with a rather determined-looking boy with cap and striped jersey, holding a football ...”

“... great and good, undoubtedly came out of the period 1640-60 which Christopher Hill calls ‘the English Revolution’. What came out, however, was not necessarily originated by the period. It is a nice problem to distinguish causation from succession. In 12 short and easygoing chapters, originally the Merle Curti Lectures at the University of ...”

“... and legitimation for the new regime.It was essentially this edition which was translated by Richard Wilhelm into German in the early part of this century. Wilhelm downplayed or overlaid the Confucian moralising; he emphasised a spirituality derived from its being in touch with ‘timeless wisdom’. This is preserved by Wilhelm’s ...”

“... of an undistinguished clique but of a base and repellent vernacular. He aimed to restore it to English literature.’ Peter Fuller did at times write with wit and brilliance, but what he was restoring art criticism to was Eng Lit rather than literature. By Eng Lit I mean that puritan and parochial academic tradition of which Leavis was the major school ...”

“... Charles I’s execution in 1649. It remains one of the most memorable and terrifying scenes in English history. Eight months later, Cromwell became Lord Protector. Under the Instrument of Government, devised mostly by John Lambert, his mercurial but talented associate, he ruled until his death in September 1658, assisted by a Council of State, in theory ...”

“... reply did for More what he had already done for some and was still to do for others of his English friends: it presented him to the learned Europe of his day. Erasmus’s share in the fashioning of his contemporaries’ – and of our – picture of the Henrician Renaissance is incalculably large. Mountjoy, his patron, might write to summon him to ...”

“... sold off, Friedrich was left with a strong desire to produce steel and steel products ‘in the English manner’, combining toughness and malleability. Friedrich squandered his grandmother’s inheritance in pursuit of his obsession. He experimented with different raw materials, different locations and different techniques. Debts piled up; he was crossed ...”

“... less to assert legislative rights than to seize executive power – though, aiming for ‘a very English absolutism’ they can look as insular in Mendle’s account as they do in Pocock’s. Pocock has retained his interest in the Civil Wars, particularly in their British dimension, but has ranged far beyond them. One hero of The Ancient Constitution was ...”

“... coloured by an invalid’s intensity of feeling. Once tasted, its flavour is not forgotten. The English village and the Coming-Out Ball are well-worn sets in the scene loft of the English novel. The country house is another. In Max Egremont’s novel Cragham Castle is not a glamorous backdrop: and even its decay is not ...”

“... the local guides if people ever came here to commit suicide. The young woman, who spoke flawless English, appeared baffled. I rephrased the question. She still didn’t understand. ‘Does anyone ever jump off here?’ I repeated. ‘To kill themselves.’ She looked at me with a frowning smile, as if at a wilfully obtuse child. ‘But why would anyone ever ...”

“... According to the English statute of treasons drawn up in 1351, it was an offence to ‘compass or imagine the death of our lord the king’. The meaning of these strange words was already archaic in the early 1790s when William Pitt’s Government brought an array of British radical reformers to trial for high treason ...”

“... Bertrand du Guesclin, the Breton adventurer who led a mixed host of French, Gascon and English free soldiers into Castile to destool King Pedro the Cruel in favour of his bastard brother Henry, rose ultimately to be constable of France. A good many English captains made considerable names for themselves in France ...”