“... There is, as Richard Graves points out, no general biography of Housman. The books about him by Laurence Housman, Grant Richards and Percy Withers are valuable, because these men knew Housman and could describe him: but they are not biographies. George Watson’s A.E. Housman: A Divided Life is more like one, but it is not quite one; of Norman Marlow and Maude Hawkins I say nothing ...”

“... unpunctuated prose-poems and cute little seven or eight-liners in free verse in the style of Richard Brautigan. (A Californian professor once plucked a volume of Brautigan out of my hand and hurled it to the ground claiming it was causing the Death of Literacy on the American Campus.) The stories are stronger, but with a maximum length of four pages they ...”

“... layout was showing the way to new retailing methods. The Derry and Toms roof garden was in an English tradition, however – such conceits had been common since the Edwardian years. The two-and-a-half-inch layer of soil is watered from artesian wells under the building. Immensely detailed and scholarly, surprising and sometimes amusing, the Survey of ...”

“... academic philosophers who have bewitched themselves into a sense of a civilising mission. For Richard Rorty, philosophers’ obsession with such merely mood-enhancing words as Reason, Reality, Truth, Objectivity and Method is little more than the fetishism of an increasingly parochial discipline. If you really want to understand how knowledge is made and ...”

“... Stuart England in two distinctive ways. Her narrative starts with one foreign fleet in the English Channel – Philip II’s failed Armada of 1588 – and ends a century later with another: William of Orange’s invasion flotilla, which brought about the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Both 1588 and 1688 were moments of intense insecurity and both were ...”

“... in the latest techniques in warfare. The army and its cannon made short work of a number of English border castles and towers. In Northumberland, James awaited the English army, led by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. Though apparently possessing advantages in ground, equipment and supplies, James allowed himself to be ...”

“... was thus immense. Hurd found only one setting by Gurney of his own words, where the musician Richard Carder, searching the archive in 1993, found 16. And as recently as 1996 a letter was unearthed, there since the beginning, enclosing 13 hitherto unknown poems of 1919. The pattern Kavanagh contrived from ‘upwards of 1700 items of verse of all ...”

“... From the 1970s early modern revisionists such as Conrad Russell and John Morrill showed that the English Civil War did not arise out of a long-running constitutional dispute centred on the rise of Parliament. Parliaments (the plural is significant) served as points of contact between the centre and the counties and were largely dominated by humdrum local ...”

“... Angevin lands now suffered the misfortune of successive rule by young Henry’s younger brothers, Richard and John, which in the end left the English monarchy reduced to lordship in twin island dominions, thwarted at least for the moment in its ambitions to be a territorial power in mainland Europe. It is easy to moralise ...”

“... of Suffolk.’ There was little between Betjeman and Pevsner when it came to what they admired in English architecture – they preferred the low-key and an absence of grandeur. ‘Betjeman’s brand of evocation,’ Harries says, ‘is more about churchgoing than about the churches themselves, and tends to turn the focus on the observer as much as the object ...”

“... towards quietism and silence. In 1920, after a career lasting half a century, the Grand Old Man of English Letters writes to Alfred Noyes: ‘ “What a fool one must have been to write for such a public!” is the inevitable reflection at the end of one’s life.’ But there is, necessarily, more to Hardy than this, and he was always torn between the impulse ...”

“... men and women – including those perhaps not so plain persons who are professors of English or History or Physics – as vaguely ludicrous. On the one hand, academic philosophy is centrally concerned with such all-pervasive concepts as those of truth, rationality and goodness: and who, whether in other academic disciplines or in the transactions ...”

“... to elicit groans than guilt. Lindsay thought more subtle approaches were timid (and, of course, ‘English’). At the start of my career I might have agreed, but even when I was in Beyond the Fringe (which I’m sure he didn’t much care for) it seemed to me that laughter had to come into the equation. And however manfully Gavin Lambert defends him, it very ...”

“... a play, and a lot of short stories. We can add that he is Belgian, a masterful mangler of the English language, always right, generally insufferable. Finney and Ustinov easily top the charts for the insufferable aspect, and Suchet is surely the most memorable and interesting incarnation, in part because he played the role on television for so long (from ...”

“... someone is filled with anger we can say – or we could say, if we spoke in the language of 1980s English-teaching textbooks – that their blood boils and they have to let off steam before they flip their lid. The assumption is that conceptual metaphors like this reflect and constrain a person’s way of thinking. It’s all a great game, and the spy ...”