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“... in many ways, it did – so did Abersychan Secondary School. The two were not as far apart as an English commentator would expect. The South Wales valleys were, and I assume still are, one-class communities, in a sense which would be incomprehensible in England. There is a status hierarchy, of course, but those at the top and those at the bottom communicate ...”

“... Willy Yeats had written by that time, and that Eliot considered that it brought a new rhythm into English verse. Who can ever forget their first throat-gulping reaction to the scene where Stephen at last decides to reject the disciplines of church and state for the free life of the artist? Young Dedalus, who has, under the temptation to become a priest, been ...”

“... they have had,’ a newspaper commented sourly). France was thought to be ‘the Hotbed to our English Youth, where they are immaturely ripened, and therefore soon become rotten and corrupt at home’. ‘The air of the Southern parts of France is warm, and impregnating,’ a gentlemen tourists’ guide of 1766 warned, ‘consequently the women extremely ...”

“... years her local department store in Bayswater) – is one of several interesting points on which Richard Greene has nothing to say in this disappointingly flat biography. Why she did it she explained herself. It was, like so much in her life and work, the result of a famously (if productively) unhappy childhood. The Sitwells, Edith and her two younger ...”

“... could be won by offering pardons to the rebels, and large areas of land could be granted to English courtiers, ideally ones with upward-turning beards, who might pacify the land by cultivation. Grey protested that Ralegh’s plans were riddled with ‘inconveniences and impossibilities’, but they appealed to Elizabeth. Fewer garrisons meant lower ...”

“... shy away from him, is evident in these two extracts. Enthusiasm is often judged bad form by the English, and Powell’s view of enthusiasm would no doubt accord with the etymological original: possession by a god, supernatural inspiration, prophetic or poetic ecstasy. Neither this, nor the boundless self-confidence which it appears to have given him, have ...”

“... still seeking God’s guidance. These lively middle-aged innocents of the 1980s seem like naughty English choirboys and girls of the 1940s. Can Modern Baptists be true to life? We may hope so. Carl Robert Pickens is occasionally called Bobby, but more often Mr Pickens, in a Dickensian, Pickwickian way. He has many problems. He has just been sacked from his ...”

“... for something else in the back pages of the impeccably learned (read: dry as dust) Review of English Studies for July 1949, there he was: ‘Frank Kermode’. Not, I was interested to note, ‘J.F. Kermode’ or any other variant that signalled the first name he never used. (It was one of the lesser indignities of his time in hospital during his final ...”

“... Winifred’s, or The World of School. There are a surprising number of novels, mainly but not all English ones, which could use the same subtitle. The Waves, or The World of School, War and Peace, or The World of School, A Passage to India, or ... ? Brighton Rock? Le Grand Meaulnes? A clear case would be Brideshead Revisited, where Brideshead is obviously the ...”

“... it has been exhaustively chronicled; and an inevitable drawback to John Lehmann’s survey of The English Poets of the First World War is that so many of his poets seem already chosen for him, so many of his conclusions already foregone. The excellence of the illustrations, the urbanity of the author’s prose, tempt one to think that every horror of our ...”

“... must not be confused with the British Scout Handbook, reprinted in 1983.) An American professor of English literature, with a strong admiration for George Orwell and Kingsley Amis, Fussell uses his nation’s Handbook in their fierce, blustering way, to challenge the conceptions of trendy-left and radical-chic folk, explaining to them that a boy who tries to ...”

“... from the age of 18 you will, on average, be 700,000 years old before you win the jackpot, and if Richard Branson succeeds in his bid for the People’s Lottery you’re more likely to be a million. The newsagent in question is on Willesden High Road, where every shop that isn’t a newsagent is a takeaway. The streets of low-rise housing go on for ever and ...”

“... gorgeous 13th-century mosaic Cosmati pavement in front of the high altar, and the portrait of Richard II, the abbey’s other profligate royal patron. It hangs almost unnoticed off a pier just by the West Door, the first contemporaneous likeness of an English king, and a rare instance of 14th-century northern European ...”

“... by Al Alvarez’s little piece, ‘Doctor in the House’, which turns out not to be a homage to Richard Gordon (sadly), but a two-and-a-half-page chat about the problems of getting his house redecorated. Mr Alvarez’s wife makes no fewer than seven appearances in this brief narrative, yet her name is not mentioned once: this in spite of the fact that the ...”

“... but uncompromisingly sensible review of Donald Davie’s Clark Lectures on the literature of the English Dissenting tradition, for example, she complains that his survey amounts to a ‘brilliant piece of canon-making for a day which epitomises criticism in our time’. The contributors to the first section of this volume seem to accept what still survives ...”