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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... encounters but zero orgasms. Adèle, an attractive Parisian woman in her thirties, with a husband, Richard, a child and a desultory job as a journalist, has what the DSM-5 would describe as a hypersexual disorder, that is, if sex addiction weren’t such a controversial diagnosis that the DSM-5 clinicians decided not to include it. ‘Adèle has been ...”

“... Arnold and Eliot ensured that the magic of monarchy and superstition permeated English literary criticism and education like a syrupy drug ... ’ Yes, this is Tom Paulin speaking. Readers of the London Review will remember the review of a collection of essays on Geoffrey Hill in which he bitterly attacked the conservatism of English poetry and criticism ...”