“... Day’. And they’ll wince at his verdict on filming The Hasty Heart (1950) at Elstree: ‘English picture-making is a strange combination of tremendously talented, creative people and incredible inefficiency that makes everything take longer than it should. Our set was a marvel of design and perspective, our cameraman without a peer, the cast truly ...”

“... present the geographer as the student of landscape, as the environmentalist and as the ideologist. Richard Muir looks at the landscape as nature’s stage. Ian Simmons and Michael Tooley, with their team of scientists, identify the stages of nature as they have changed through the successive periods of British prehistory. David Stoddart’s conclave of ...”

“... as just another way of talking about this kind of telegraph, and both words slid swiftly into English following the French system’s unprecedented success; the adoption of ‘telegraph’ as a newspaper title came as early as 1794. It was also the obvious term to use to describe the new undersea cables, carrying the concept across to quite different (and ...”

“... increasingly to the composition of plays and poems. For fifty years he promoted the cause of Basic English. It should not be supposed that the interaction of Richards’s concerns led to the creation of any single, unified system. Perhaps if it had, his work would not have suffered that neglect of which he himself was conscious from at least 1951 (and matters ...”

“... this immortal ‘me’. Discussing a study of 1883 entitled Walt Whitman and written by his friend Richard Bucke, he insists to Traubel that his endorsement of the book was never meant to extend to its interpretations: as to his explication – no, no, no – that I do not accept – for Leaves of Grass baffles me, its author, at all points of its meaning ...”

“... a British conflagration was on the cards? Certainly this claim was explicit in The Making of the English Working Class. And though the buoyancy and optimism of the 1960s which helped to make Thompson’s book have receded, its influence and example have not. Indeed the obligation to study past radicalism felt by many socialist historians, and (to borrow one ...”

“... The golden age of the Royal Court invoked by today’s ‘whenwes’ are the early years of the English Stage Company, started in 1955 by George Devine and Tony Richardson, although the theatre enjoyed at least as luminous a period from 1904 to 1907 when Harley Granville-Barker was its artistic director. The Royal Court is the perfect size for a ...”

“... Frederick Ives Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago.1 Tom Mitchell, chairman of the English Department and editor of Critical Inquiry, the English-language journal in which Derrida most often publishes, introduced him to a crowd that filled not only the seats and aisles of the Max Palevsky Auditorium, but the ...”

“... a science-fiction novel, The Coming Race (1871); a pioneering sociological study, England and the English (1833); 11 volumes of poetry; a history of Athens and translations of Horace and Schiller. He published ten plays: some bombed, but three remained stockpieces throughout the 19th century. The best of these, Money (1840), was revived last June at the ...”

“... Italian opera and those of (dramatic) French opera (Herbert Josephs), and on French Wagnerism (Richard Sieburth). Ideal site that it is in which to register the mutual exchanges between art-forms, the theatre does conspicuously well throughout this History, where drama is seen no longer simply as a script but as a mutable event, evolving in its own richly ...”

“... There have been only four consorts (counting the present incumbent) of reigning English queens. The role is awkward: a ‘lot high and brilliant’, as Prince Albert himself put it, ‘but also plentifully strewn with thorns’. Other states make (or made) sensible provision either to avoid the inherent difficulties or to accommodate them ...”

“... July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help. But when the next Supplement was published, between 1972 and 1986, the tramlines were back, in many cases ...”

“... I first met Richard Cobb at my Balliol interview one late evening in December 1970. The encounter was, by any measurement, a failure. In the ‘interests’ section of my entrance form, I had made the mistake of declaring membership of the Committee for Freedom in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea. Cobb, who was plainly bored at having to conduct interviews after dinner, asked me brusquely which liberation group in Angola I supported and why ...”

“... vengefulness, the compulsive penis envy, and the desire to be whipped, of Captain Ahab. Only Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast and, in The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman, whose homosexual proclivities deserve more attention here, come forward as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types ...”

“... avant-garde – Webern, Boulez and Stockhausen – to which his contemporaries Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett were also drawn. The mecca for music students in those days was Stockhausen’s headquarters at Darmstadt, where the ‘Darmstadt Headbangers’, as Tom Lubbock describes them, treated Britten and Shostakovich with derision as ...”