“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... This compilation arose out of Jonathan Miller’s 1985 production of Don Giovanni for the English National Opera, and his introduction to the book is agreeably illuminating, not least for those who for one reason or another never go to the opera. The main characters of Don Giovanni, he notes, have a prior and conspicuous existence outside the opera, being well-established figures of myth, a fact which both helps and hinders ...”

“... attempt to find a clue to the elusive pattern of his motives, he was asked to say with whom in the English Civil War he could identify himself. Would a lover of liberty, women, wine and hard news have been a Cavalier or a Roundhead? I remember the occasion. The answer was as inconclusive as perhaps the question was misconceived. Nevertheless, the episode made ...”

“... of Vanity Fair. In ‘real life’, Meredith judiciously observes in his novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, ‘all hangs together,’ but that’s not obviously the way things work in the Meredithian world. What did his admirers see in him? A good place to start is G.M. Trevelyan’s The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith (1906), which helpfully ...”

“... The modern history of English secondary education begins with the 1944 Education Act, usually known as the Butler Act. It was, for better and worse, the most important piece of education legislation of the 20th century, but was expected to reform an educational system already deeply divisive and inequitable. In some ways it promoted the hopes of wartime democracy; in others it betrayed them ...”

“... on portobello mushrooms and linguine frutti di mare, while at a small Mid-western college the English department chair picked me up for dinner at 4.45, greeted his colleagues in an empty restaurant at five and by 5.30 was briskly scraping the remnants of my half-eaten chicken kebab into a styrofoam box. ‘No point in wasting this,’ he said. ‘I’ll ...”

“... is again accompanied by critical reflections and illustrated by frequent quotations (all in English translation). But this history is not a handbook. It is described as a ‘one-man tour d’horizon’, and its scope and range are determined by its author’s predilections. Mr Levi covers the poets pretty thoroughly, and he neglects none of the ...”

“... and so did men of the calibre of Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Henry Grattan, David Ricardo, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Wilberforce. ‘What a mercy to have been born an Englishman, in the 18th century,’ mused the latter, and if one had the right class and gender and a taste for rhetoric, flair and professionalism in government, that was ...”

“... Leigh went to lick their wounds for a month in Vermont with ‘the Alexander Woollcotts’. The English period equivalent would be a month in the country with the Beverley Nicholses. Holden is sometimes forgetful, evacuating the wartime Old Vic in one chapter to Burnley, in the next to Barnsley, and poor at sums. He gives the age of Olivier, born in ...”

“... the advent of sustained war in and from the air. Edith Sitwell’s ‘Still falls the rain’ and Richard Eberhart’s ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment’ overreach themselves in their attempts to find a rhetorical lift to match the fall of bombs. Keith Douglas was the best of the English Second World War poets because he ...”