“... throne, passed down through a series of unexpected heirs (the second son, a minor, two daughters), English monarchs of the 16th century had continuous need of burnishing. They commissioned artists to produce pieces that projected a glorious heritage and irrefutable authority. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Holbein’s mural of Henry VIII, Henry ...”

“... Mr Bellow. Tell me, what did you study at university?’ Bellow replied that his study had been English literature. He was asked to give his opinion of William Wordsworth as a poet. He responded that he had always thought of William Wordsworth as one of the Romantics. ‘There is no place for you,’ said Chambers on hearing this, ‘in this ...”

“... in six editions during his life, and in two more by 1640. The most popular of the plays were Richard III and Richard II, each of which went through five editions before 1616. Romeo and Juliet went through four; Hamlet appeared in three. For readers since the 18th century, the narrative poems have been at best marginal ...”

“... connects Los Angeles proper to the even more suburban San Fernando Valley, much was written about Richard Meier’s architecture and Robert Irwin’s gardens. Remarkably little was written about the parking garage, though it’s the first structure you encounter on arriving at the Getty. (Theoretically, you could take a bus there, but this is, after all, a ...”

“... reconstructed iguanodon, the head of both the table and the beast was held – as of right – by Richard Owen, universally acknowledged as Britain’s premier anatomist, ‘the English Cuvier’, and arguably the foremost British ‘man of science’ of his generation. It is true that he was not, even then, entirely ...”

“... the ideal virtuoso and Grand Tourist. He was first drawn to the subject by the Roman landscapes of Richard Wilson; published a book on Wilson’s then little-known drawings; and went on to annotate the letters written from Rome in 1757 by a minor British painter who had mentioned Wilson and other British travellers and expatriates in the city. This led him to ...”

“... Richard Flanagan trained as a historian, and his novels have often emphasised the redemptive power of memory. For his characters, though, remembering is a strenuous business. There are traps to be avoided and barriers to overcome – an obstacle course of crying jags, guilt-ridden stupors, deathbed hallucinations ...”

“... Pétain’s exaltation of the peasants, ‘their features seamed by harsh toil’, leaves the English historian cold. As Gide said, ‘fine sentiments make bad literature.’ There is, of course, no question of the regions being denied their proper place, but they only really come into their own at times of utter chaos or unmitigated tragedy – for ...”

“... like Hell and you will get there.’ Old songs came back: O my shoes are Japanese, The trousers English, if you please, On my head’s a Russian hat, But I’m Indian for all that. I knew that I had tapped a rich seam: but I’m not gifted with total recall, and it was precisely the partial nature of these memories, their fragmentation, that made them so ...”

“... nor to be seen as, what she in fact anxiously-too-early sees herself as being: ‘the bewildered English spinster, now rather gaunt and toothy, but with a mild, sweet expression’. This mocking, harping self-characterisation seems to reflect two sides of the writer’s nature. One is a frank response to the socially convenable, a humane and simple wish to ...”

“... close competitor was brought out from the shadows where he now lurks, uncollected and unread. For Richard Holt Hutton was a prodigious and impressive critic. And unlike Arnold he made literary (and theological) criticism his profession. Hutton was the author of about seven thousand reviews and essays. He edited the Spectator from 1861 until his death in ...”

“... happiness in later life hard won. Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was born in Manchester in 1882 to Richard Pankhurst, a radical barrister, and Emmeline Goulden, his stylish, much younger wife. A second child, she would always claim that her pretty elder sister, Christabel, got the lion’s share of attention – though, amusingly, the third ...”

“... Zaire river for a steamer to take him to Kisangani. Behind him are North Africa, Francophone and English-speaking Africa, and a disastrous foray into the former black American colony of Liberia; behind him, too, three hundred pages of mounting exasperation with the poverty, filth, incompetence and bullying he has encountered on all sides. Finally the steamer ...”

“... In​ 1948 Allan Wingate published British Pamphleteers, a collection of tracts assembled by Richard Reynolds and introduced by George Orwell. The first pamphlet in the book is John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet (1558), which begins: ‘To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will and approved ordinance, and finallie it is the subversion of good order, of all equitie and justice ...”

“... mountainous terrain. This is Ronald Forrester, dust ‘clogging the pores on his pink perspiring English face’. Hari Kunzru, Forrester’s creator, didn’t have to look too far for his character’s name: Forrester works with trees. There is a self-conscious aside: ‘In the European club at Simla they never tire of the joke, Forrester the ...”