“... 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 ...”

“... 1580s until the 1620s, and the age of latter-day heroic actors – Orson Welles, Donald Wolfit, Richard Burton and Albert Finney – from the 1930s until the 1970s.What mainly kept Marlowe himself alive in the popular imagination was the resonance between his sole English chronicle play, Edward II, with its explicit ...”

“... about? I deliberately called my work a ‘life’ of Orwell because, as I argued in the book, English ‘biography’, since the time of Dr Johnson, has come to imply the portrait of a character. The main business of a biographer has often been thought to be that of ‘getting inside’ his subject, ‘grasping the inwardness’, ‘revealing the true ...”

“... A socially adverse public record is, on the whole, advantageous. The more felonious associates of Richard Nixon were unquestionably enhanced as authors by their criminality. However, this is not essential: Mr David Stockman, President Reagan’s first Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, has been offered a million or so for the rendering ...”

“... so as to place her works ‘alongside those of Brancusi, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pollock, Rothko or Richard Serra’. What else to expect from curators capable of insisting that the true home of modern art was St Ives or Yorkshire? ‘Pretending that it was is complacent, insular and either intellectually dishonest or genuinely stupid.’ How dishonest are ...”

“... know next to nothing about the major Victorian publishers who were his partners. An exception is Richard Bentley, whose publishing career was extensively dealt with in Royal Gettmann’s A Victorian Publisher. There are objections to Peter Mann’s attempt to flatten out the distinction between literary and non-literary books. So, too, are there objections ...”

“... Every country has its social obsession, and class is undoubtedly the British, or at any rate English, obsession. It is, to be sure, more amusing than some others. When Franz Josef Strauss recently argued that the Nazis had, after all, been ‘National Socialists’ and were therefore closer to the Social Democrats than to him, his extraordinary invective backfired, but the intensity of the public debate that followed showed that the subject was close to an understandable, and deadly serious, German obsession ...”

“... years since a permanent Venetian consulate had been established there, and 150 since the third English consul, John Eldred (who sailed to Aleppo on the Tiger, like the man the witch in Macbeth plans to kill), observed that it had been described so often it was hardly worth saying anything more about it. For Ralph Fitch, in 1594, Aleppo must have seemed one ...”

“... can be imagined for a man than absolute blind submission to an unjust law.’ By contrast with the English conception of liberty, which Cohen’s cod-philosopher thinks tantamount to the ‘vertiginous regressivity of choice’, the Germans supposedly see ‘true freedom’ as consisting in an ‘orderly’ attachment to ‘oppression’, ‘tyranny’ and the ...”

“... After many vicissitudes the Library of America was launched, under the direction of Daniel Aaron, Richard Poirier and Jason Epstein, who had worked with Wilson on the original abortive project. These people and their associates raised $600,000 from the Ford Foundation and then $1.2 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Then they went to work ...”

“... Infanta Margarita at the time. Or it may be symptomatic of the French interest in the English pastoral. Delacroix visited England in 1825, meeting both Lawrence and Richard Parkes Bonington; the trip inspired his outdoor portrait of Louis-Auguste Schwiter, which Degas later bought for his private ...”

“... from the Latin luminare – meant ‘to illuminate’. The Italian miniatura (from which the English word ‘miniature’ derives) originally referred to an image within an illuminated manuscript, ‘miniatura’ being the noun form of the late Latin verb miniare (literally, ‘to paint with red lead pigment’, the word for which was minium).Around ...”

“... pot never boils’. No one can wholly avoid hating ‘Old Daddy Franklin’, from whose Poor Richard’s Almanac these sayings come, especially if brought up to revere him in Public School, USA. Abraham Lincoln is the father of his people; George Washington, of his nation; but Benjamin Franklin – as it happens, a basically very decent man – hovers ...”

“... well-founded suspicions about the value of moral philosophy as it has been practised in the English-speaking world since the days of Sidgwick. But Baier goes a step beyond these suspicions. It is her feminism, and the attention which feminism brings with it to specific, concrete, injustices, that have enabled her to do so. She offers not just ...”