“... count for much with this unimpressionable ex-cabaret dancer – un serpent qui danse, the poet said, using an image not highly regarded by the girl who knows perfectly well how snakes move. Nor is she willing to accept without comment the exotic heritage he foists on her – la langoureuse Asie et la brûlante Afrique (all that) – knowing herself, in ...”

“... train station – a location suitable to the memory of one who was always in transition. Janet said passionately how much she disliked Oxford – surprising myself, who still loved Oxford with a devotion that might have seemed simple-minded even to me if it had not been so iridescent. I was impressed by both the intensity and the sophistication of ...”

“... prophets, it encouraged those Welsh who had felt exiles in their own land since the victories of Edward I to pursue claims made as the original ‘Britons’. Glyn Dŵr had little trouble in linking himself with the long line of Welsh messiahs, including Arthur, who offered to expel the English and regain control of the whole island of Britain. The revolt ...”

“... worked out all right in the end – as propagandists for England’s providential destiny always said it would. Episodes of apparent divine preservation – the wrecking of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 – were exploited for all they were worth. This rhetoric masked the pragmatic manoeuvres taking place behind the ...”

“... That wonderful Edward Coke,’ wrote the great Maitland, ‘masterful, masterless man.’ Others prefer the judgment of the Australian judge and historian James Spigelman: Coke’s mind ‘was so narrow and unsubtle, so incapable of jettisoning detail, so often inconsistent, that no one has ever speculated that he wrote the works of Shakespeare ...”

“... had only five kings, one of whom, Æthelbald, was ‘the longest-reigning English monarch before Edward III’, a record (716-57) almost beaten by his successor, Offa (757-96). The kings held together what were initially separate tribes or people – the Hwicce, whose name survives in Wychwood, the dwellers of the Peak district and the Wrekin; the ...”

“... vanish, into thin air.’ Beckett’s Dying Words is not a study of Beckett’s dying words if he said any, or of Malone’s. It is about words spoken or written in the vicinity of death, responsive to a conviction of their own death – a death which does not abort the possibility of a little further life before the body is coffined. It is a study of the ...”

“... the dance. There was a Princess Margaret Set, just as the Prince Regent had the Carlton House Set, Edward VII had the Marlborough House Set, and Edward VIII had the Fort Belvedere Set: three playboys, only one playgirl. It is 15 years since she died, and memories of her are not as sharp as they were. Which makes Craig ...”

“... decaying sense but always new and stainless like the idea of rights – rights not duties be it said – yes brother so Locke hires a surgeon barber to make an incision in the Earl of Shaftesbury’s right side for like a monstrous dragon of superstition and formal piety the suppurating cyst on the earl’s liver menaced English liberty but the little ...”

“... Here is a fullish description of the ‘cowardly brute’ from Thomas Hughes: Flashman, be it said, was about 17 years old, and big and strong for his age. He played well at all games where pluck wasn’t much wanted, and managed generally to keep up appearances where it was; and having a bluff, off-hand manner, which passed for heartiness, and ...”

“... a sound guide to advanced taste in the late Twenties. Writing of the postwar years, Leavis had said: ‘The opposition to the Georgians was already at the time in question (just after the war) Sitwellism. But the Sitwells belong to the history of publicity rather than of poetry.’ This Osbert hated. His anti-Georgian blasts, his own ‘let us be ...”

“... he was given a knighthood and the OM; he was swept up into the arms of the Establishment; even Edward VII recognised a good tune when he heard one. By 1911, Elgar was one of the most famous men in the land: the hoped-for glory had come. But in 1920, Alice died, and Elgar the composer died with her. As the last verse of ‘The Music ...”

“... blooms in particular have been summarily attacked as weeds. The hot temper of so many responses to Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) indicates that many scholars, herbicide to hand, regard Marxist historiography as a menace. Professor J.H. Hexter’s recent ad hominem assault on Christopher Hill’s scholarly integrity seems to ...”

“... Alan of Galloway, with his two hundred ships, was the great warrior of the 13th century, Edward I, ‘Hammer of the Scots’, by contrast a buffoon who built his castles in the wrong place as the result of a failure to understand sea-power. Bannockburn and Edward II get a fair hearing for a book on naval ...”

“... tells the stories of free Africans living in England: John Blanke, the royal trumpeter; Edward Swarthye, the trusted upper servant of a leading Gloucestershire landowner; Cattelena, an independent Black ‘singlewoman’ living with her cow in the village of Almondsbury, near Bristol; Reasonable Blackman (or Blakemore), a successful silk-weaver in ...”