“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a schoolroom or a court of law. ‘Marlowe, next to Carlyle, was the most thoroughly depraved of English writers.’ To this pronouncement, instanced by Professor Brewer, what rejoinder is possible for a young man who has been reading Marlowe’s plays and perhaps acting in one of them, but has no more than a dim memory of looking into Sartor Resartus when ...”

“... of the Egyptian pyramids and the Roman amphitheatres’. To one Italian observer, the English palace – with brick walls 300 feet long, so many windows that it seemed as though half the building was ‘made entirely of glass’, and chambers that in size and opulence outdid some of Henry’s permanent houses back home – merited the simplest and ...”