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“... heroine, Madge, goes on holiday to Cornwall. She falls a little in love with a professor of English literature who has been blinded in action, and reads aloud to him. One of the passages he has her recite is an analysis of Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Of Weeping’:Weep me not dead means: ‘do not make me cry myself to death; do not kill me with the ...”

“... with their institutions, cultures and perceived or experienced histories – Florentine, French, English, Dutch; others were cosmopolitan respublicae christianae or républiques des lettres, in which massive schematisations of discourse were produced, circulated and discussed both in and out of ‘national’ context. These communities – both the product ...”

“... on they’ll be hard to stop. The Tate’s is the kind of show that sets one generalising. Richard Dorment in the Daily Telegraph, for instance, wrote that it had managed ‘to take a non-subject (Picasso’s impact here was limited to a handful of artists) and turn it into a gripping indictment of British culture in the first half of the 20th ...”

“... In a striking passage in his memoirs Richard Baxter recalls watching the battle of Langport as a young chaplain in the army of the Parliament. After some fierce fighting, panic suddenly set in among the Royalists on the opposite hill. Standing next to Baxter was the godly Major Thomas Harrison. As the Cavaliers broke and fled, Baxter heard him ‘with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God with fluent expressions, as if he had been in a rapture ...”

“... that her life as an artist began. Rodin made it possible for Frink to fathom the gulf between English sculptors and their Continental counterparts. Among the latter she counted not only elder statesmen such as Aristide Maillol, but also a younger generation in which Alberto Giacometti, Jean Fautrier and Germaine Richier (who had trained under Antoine ...”

“... she is his daughter. In recent months she has been in the China-watchers’ sights. Promoting the English edition in a New York Times interview she appeared to say that her father was fading fast. Later she caused another stir when a visit by her to Japan was cancelled. It is Deng Rong who has steered the doddering Deng on his rare public appearances (the ...”

“... at most, a vague romanticism about ‘feudalism’, as supposedly incarnated in the English country gentleman, and an equally vague notion (perhaps this came a little later) of ‘Gallic altruism’. And in this, Green says or implies, his mixed nationality made life more difficult for him. For he could have no loyalty to his father’s Germany ...”

“... In Pushkin’s introduction to Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, which is included in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of Pushkin’s prose, a friend of the deceased (fictional) writer, a neighbouring squire, says that after his death Belkin’s housekeeper ‘sealed all of her cottage windows with the first part of a ...”

“... in Eliot’s royalist rejection of Milton’s republican poetics. The revival of interest in English republicanism in recent years might be thought to have stimulated interest in Milton, but here Thomas Corns, editor of A Companion to Milton, sounds a warning note. This collection of essays, he writes, appears at a time when Milton’s standing with a ...”

“... A central tenet of the current Eurosceptic case resides in the contrast between English pragmatists, blessed with an instinctive distrust of the systems concocted by philosophers, and dreamy Continentals whose chequered histories bear witness to a dangerous addiction to fresh starts, a priori blueprints, legal codification and all the other follies of political rationalism ...”

“... that Elizabeth could be assassinated, and his secretary, Courcelles, did not become an English mole. (I confess that I said he did, but withdrew the charge in a second account which Honan cites.) Padua was not an independent city-state. The English College at Douai did not train Jesuits, and Robert Parsons, who ...”

“... text, the ‘Tretis of Love Hevenliche’, a work eventually destined for the dusty glory of Early English Texts Society publication. It’s not my period, but despite some convincing quotation and an authenticating footnote, this work by ‘Robert of St Victor’ appears to be invented. (Readers of Wilson’s earlier novels will expect highly specialised ...”

“... net result was 35 expulsions. Today, the school is quite proud of the ‘Great Rebellion’: the English establishment thrives on tricks of this kind – witness the Shelley memorial at University College, Oxford. The first time I saw If ..., Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 fable of public school rebellion, was at a screening organised by Winchester College’s ...”

“... is gripping, partisan and emotional, a welcome complement to the only other serious biography in English, Justin Wintle’s assiduously comprehensive Perfect Hostage. It contains fascinating new material and conveys, better than any other account, the stirring drama of her confrontations with the junta. But perhaps the most interesting thing about it is its ...”

“... for war is, as Steven Gunn’s book shows, less certain. War was, however, central to the English experience, both in the practical sense that armies were sent frequently into battle, but also in the more amorphous sense that national identity was shaped by the memory of the Hundred Years War. Henry was highly conscious of the military achievements of ...”