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“... social and economic history and more world history or the inclusion of more modern literature in English and modern languages courses. What my own children have had the opportunity of learning at school has seemed much richer than the rather fuddy-duddy offerings of my own Fifties grammar-school education. When future historians come to write the social ...”

“... with a council road gang, have known each other for fifteen years and talked only about football. Richard – who went to college for a bit and is deeply scholarly about the music press of the late Seventies – has ‘his records, his friends, papers, Dostoyevsky and a dream of owning a decent second-hand record shop’. Dostoyevsky is ‘that rarity of ...”

“... warrant against the would-be assassin. (The irony was that Frederick enjoyed a reputation as ‘English’ and liberal – even if England was hardly a liberal model when it came to capital punishment.) In the 1880s, executions resumed across Germany, sometimes after a gap of fifteen years. In Prussia, they became much more frequent when William II arrived ...”

“... and his greatest. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), was one – J.K. Galbraith told Richard Swedberg – that he himself disdained. It was too popular. His first, which he wrote in 1908, when he was 25, irritated the historical economists, who dominated the subject in Austria, with its defence of the new marginalism. His second, The Theory of ...”

“... tackle aspects of British history which would be spurned by British publishers. Without a doubt, Richard Altick chose the best decade of Punch to study, for in many a later period momentous events went unnoticed in its pages and a social conscience was not easy to detect in the weekly output of ‘subsistence journalism’ (Altick’s phrase). By ...”

“... Charles I’s capture and execution the conflict continued. ‘Long wars make men inhumane,’ Richard Ward wrote in The Anatomy of Warre: ‘that is, at first sinne seems to us loathing, but often sinning makes sinne seeme nothing … where before [a soldier] ever entered into the wars, he thought he could never be so cruell, as to dash the childrens ...”

“... Richard Ford​ is sceptical about character. He thinks it changeable, provisional, unpredictable, irresolute and ‘decidedly unwhole’, which makes things tricky for a novelist. You send a man to see his girlfriend in the expectation that she’ll dump him and she tells him how sweet he is. You don’t know where you are with people ...”

“... of the untold story. He is the author of eight novels, the last three of which are available in English (from Harvill) as All Souls, A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. All three are admirably translated by Margaret Jull Costa, who not only catches the meanings of words with grace and precision, but gets rhythms of thought, and even ...”

“... earlier; he preferred squatting on the floor to the discomfort of chairs but feared that his English visitors might regard this as backward. Elsewhere, Mr Willoughby, the magistrate, is vexed by his failure to persuade the local landowners to address the annual floods by reinforcing embankments instead of sacrificing goats. Come the rainy season, the ...”

“... are almost unknown outside Latin America, and his writings have never been translated into English. Yet between 1824 and 1852, he lived and worked in Colombia and Bolivia, in Peru and Chile, and in Ecuador. He was a man with unorthodox ideas about education and commerce. He also had a passionate belief, unpopular at the time, in the need to integrate ...”

“... custom to view them as the successive representatives of a single empiricist tradition. It is the English rather than the British who excel in the invention of traditions. And although the presence of an Irish bishop and a Scottish sceptic in the empiricist trinity made it necessary to think of the tradition under the title of ‘British’ rather than ...”

“... variously furnished with illuminations, music, even fanciful biographies of the poets. In English, by contrast, signed lyrics appear only in the 14th century, more than a hundred years after the troubadours flourished, and even then, lyrics by named poets constitute only a fraction of the great bulk of Middle ...”

“... both ways, allowing his bogusly emancipated reader to feel superiorly satirical about the redneck English while suddenly unmasking foreignness as a genuine threat, and so sending up liberals like himself into the bargain. But the days when any half-decent verse or prose emanating from the former Empire could be recruited as ‘Commonwealth ...”

“... been a great success in 1922. There seems to have been a market in those years for a peculiarly English brand of fantasy, but any imputation of parochialism must fail: Garnett was a man of wide interests, who wrote poems in French as well as fantasies in English; he was a friend of D.H. Lawrence, and of course his ...”

“... arrive by bike, some engraved onto dayglo perspex and delivered with fairy tale gravitas. The Richard James show, held in a long glass corridor on Park Lane, also had a military theme, depicting the savoir-faire of the Desert Rats, their khaki humility, their blond and fawn reserve, as opposed to their real-life fear and thirst on the baking sand. In the ...”