“... women who were to become, or beginning to be, what the Germans call prominente. Among them were Richard Crossman, A.L. Rowse, Maurice Bowra, Isaiah Berlin, David Astor and the journalist Shiela Grant Duff, who, in 1982, published a book about their relationship, and followed it up with a volume of their correspondence. At opposite ends of the political ...”

“... artists. Turner and Constable would have known even the landscapes of their great predecessor Richard Wilson mainly through some wonderful prints by Woollett and others, and at the Academy no fewer than 12 of these are exhibited together, classical landscapes animated by mythological figures, and opposite them some of the great Welsh views including ...”

“... the respect for working-class values which he associates with the work of Williams, Young and Richard Hoggart, and before that of D.H. Lawrence, and which would appear here to have followed on a spell of postwar indifference. The working class is thought by these writers to be marked by a power of sympathy, of closeness and attachment, which makes them ...”

“... The most interesting book of first poems in many years’, Richard Howard proclaimed in 1981. James Merrill, John Hollander and John Ashbery spoke in similarly emphatic terms, while Anthony Hecht saluted an ‘extraordinarily fine’ debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David Kalstone wrote, ‘in saying it appeared with that sense of completeness of utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South ...”

“... a good one and a bad. New to me and truly funny, for instance, is ‘The Skinhead Hamlet’ by Richard Curtis. I am grateful, and yet this gift-horse must be looked in the mouth since it is a stalking-horse. It isn’t a parody at all but a spoof and a burlesque. Brett’s dullard identifying of two main types of parody (of style and of form!) isn’t even ...”

“... whites who address Aborigines as ‘Jacky-Jacky, boy’, but she herself ridicules a German’s English (‘You tink dis iss a bloody holiday or sometink?’) apparently without seeing that this is equally offensive. And I’m not quite sure whether she knows what her own role was in the desert, or since, when she has started to enjoy her journey’s ...”

“... compiled is impressive and often amusing. Back to Seneca they go, and forwards and outwards to Richard Brautigan. Busily, the melons, pumpkins and gourds are gathered in. Each quotation is given, cacophonously, in its original language (the translations appear elsewhere, which is a monstrous imposition), and its meaning rapidly adduced. Bit by bit ...”

“... so far as I know, many other acting dogs in the considerable amount of Renaissance drama in English that has come down to us. There is one – and it doesn’t seem likely that Ben Jonson was uninfluenced by Shakespeare when, in Every Man out of his Humour, only a few years after the earlier comedy, he gave a dog to his foolish country ...”

“... road and through this gate, on a day in late August or early September 1617, came the eccentric English author, polyglot and traveller Thomas Coryate. He was a smallish, bearded man with a long, rather lugubrious face – ‘the shape of his head’, according to one description, was ‘like a sugar-loaf inverted, with the little end before’. He wore ...”

“... as he was. On the whole, Mr Jay’s point has been well taken. Since the 18th century, the English, or at least their intelligentsia, have developed a fierce, almost incestuous pride in their national monuments, to which there is no real parallel among their neighbours – not that this has prevented some ‘Wander Witts’ from indulging an equally ...”

“... David Hume once remarked that the English had the least national character of any people in the universe. Perhaps this was a cunning Scottish put-down, since character is just what the English pride themselves on. They may not bestride the world in intellect, cuisine or emotional intimacy, but these fancy pursuits can be left to foreigners, and don’t count for much compared to their own moral robustness ...”

“... The last time a ‘gentleman of the road’ cried ‘Stand and deliver!’ on an English highway is thought to have been in 1831. High tobymen, or horsed robbers, had yielded the field to low tobymen, or footpads, and roadside thieving had lost its traditional panache. By coincidence 1831 was the year the robber fraternity that had given the word ‘thug’ to the language came under terminal assault: the British in India, showing a zeal never displayed against England’s home-bred highwaymen, rounded up in six years 3266 devotees of thuggee, hanged 412 and imprisoned or transported hundreds more, extinguishing a centuries-old cult ...”

“... at the General Council of the New Model Army, which was meeting in Putney at the height of the English Revolution. The debate was scribbled down in shorthand by the Army secretary, William Clarke, who had a remarkable knack for appearing at and recording decisive historical events. He was, for instance, on the scaffold at Westminster 14 months later, on a ...”

“... spat, based on the profound difference of temperament and experience between a giggly English prep school master turned poet and an émigré German art historian. Mowl is a far from even-handed chairman of the debate. You have only to look at the photographs: a snap taken by a friend (his publisher) of Betjeman laughing fit to bust and scattering ...”

“... in February. Reading from the transcript of an interview with Irving on Australian television, Richard Rampton QC, barrister for the defence, asks why Irving had said that the idea of black men playing cricket for England made him feel ‘queasy’. Irving: My reply to him on air was, what a pity it is that we have to have blacks on the team and that they ...”