“... 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 ...”

“... but clear-sighted perspective. No blackwash, no hagiography, no wild critical assessments.‘An English Intellectual’ is at first sight a strange way to describe a man who so resolutely avoided the discomforts of his home country. But the subtitle signals the critical thrust of Murray’s book. He opposes the ‘new orthodoxy’ expounded by John Carey in ...”

“... Hampton, Windsor) and charging them with nostalgia. It is, I think, the only piece of English verse to give place names something of the power they have in Dante’s momentary biography of La Pia (‘Siena mi fé, disfecemi Maremma’ – ‘Siena made me, Maremma unmade me’). It also gives away just enough biographical detail to have been blown ...”

“... surprising that similar ferocious contentions have surrounded a man who was at once traditionally English and politically revolutionary, rather as there would be unavoidable controversy over an animal which had the rib-cage of a hippo and the snout of a badger. The case for the prosecution is that Orwell was a self-mythologising romantic toff who went in for ...”

“... I noticed that when people were speaking in tongues, instead of producing a nonsense version of English, they seemed to produce a tourist’s imitation of Hebrew – a throaty noise as if they were saying the Scottish words ‘Loch Shiel’ over and over again. The idea seemed to be that this was more ‘religious’, a small Jerusalem moment. The theology ...”

“... is similar to the one Ingres put M. Bertin the banker in) would be used again in the portrait of Richard Arkwright. Miss Cracroft from the same year is a tumble of satin and lace; a veil blows from her shoulder and flowers garland her bosom, but despite the mobile stuffs her face is as still, her back as rigid, as Anne Bateman’s. The catalogue suggests ...”

“... the favourites: Even more than the better-known The Forest Lovers I loved The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay, about King Richard the Lion-Hearted, published in 1900 ... the medieval romances I was writing at top speed on an empty stomach were meant to be in his manner. I cannot remember whether I showed any of them ...”

“... by Waterhouse’s concern with the pedigrees of the painters he discussed, men like Thomas Jones, Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why pedigree mattered ...”

“... time to notice the high-spiritedness of his friends, happy to be in the company of the head of the English Catholics, a man not given to any obvious show of relaxation but, rather, seeming constantly anxious about being behind with business. Nearby is the English College, or the Venerable ...”

“... of William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier biography, ‘a model of hard-nosed and painstaking investigation’. Hall was the first to reveal Stanley’s secret engagement to Alice Pike. Unfortunately, his excitement over this discovery led him to make the tactical error of ...”

“... for a split at 1815 and an end in the 1880s. So in choosing to conclude his new survey at 1880, Richard Price joins a long tradition of irreverent timekeeping. Except that, according to Price, it is not the 19th century that ends in the 1880s, but the ‘long’ 18th century. In recent years the lifetime of the distinctive political regime and social ...”

“... in 1740, a date at which many educated persons and even second-rate playwrights could write lively English. Cibber became Poet Laureate and is now best known as the victim of Pope’s ridicule, but his book gives one a lively idea not only of the theatre of his day and its antecedents but of the political world in which it had to exist. His perceptive sketches ...”

“... Trippie and Jacobus Depre. (The two Jacobi would, of course, be Jacques in French and James in English. Mullett is elsewhere written as Millett, and Trippie as Tippey.) Mountjoy puts up £20 – half of the required bail – to guarantee their appearance at the forthcoming Sessions of the Peace, where they are ‘bound to answere their incontinencye wth ...”

“... church towers and at Oxford and Cambridge colleges the latest architectural ideas were emerging as English Perpendicular, the fine-boned local expression of Gothic. Henry VII’s long-lost palaces stood at Richmond and Greenwich, and at Burbage in Wiltshire, John Seymour was starting work on his expensive new house, Wolfhall. Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, like ...”