“... and formidable art politician – has been recognised as an invaluable source of information about English artists of the Romantic period. Running from 1793, when the compiler was 46, to his death 28 years later, it covers one of the most exciting times in the history of British painting. The two great landscapists Turner and Constable were developing their ...”

“... and eccentrics (The Old Boys, The Boarding-House), squinnying at the frailties of the genteel English. Increasingly, though, he’s returned to his own Irish Protestant Ascendancy background, re-creating it with melancholy nostalgia, flecked with comedy but also burdened with hopelessness and impotence. Trevor’s most considerable strength, from the ...”

“... as serious as birth, there was no reliable doctor outside London. Indeed it was only for us, us English as he must have thought of us, my mother, my brother and me, that an English doctor would do at all. For himself, until history put a stop to it, he always went to Berlin to see his doctor, and, when his doctor came to ...”

“... comforts of hard power, some moments now look like straws in the wind. In late November 2010 the English FA sent David Cameron, Prince William and David Beckham to Fifa headquarters in Zurich to lobby on its behalf before the vote for the right to host the 2018 World Cup. Two old Etonians and an alumnus of Chingford County High School: the sight of these ...”

“... had shifted location: the debate about the dating of his work took place between Blunt and another English connoisseur, Denis Mahon; investigation of his iconography was conducted in the Teutonic spirit of the Warburg Institute. The French Poussin, ‘the contemporary of Descartes and the master of Le Brun’, the Poussin of Paul Desjardins’s La Méthode des ...”

“... It was Richard Crossman who described secrecy as ‘the British disease’. As with other alleged vices anglais – strikes, spanking and sodomy spring to mind – this seems on the surface to be unfair. Other societies have undoubtedly been as secretive. Soviet Russia, for example: I don’t suppose it was any easier to see your medical records there than it is here ...”

“... most delightful melodies and attracting composers from Mozart and Beethoven to Saint-Saëns and Richard Strauss to write music for the instrument. I once heard Bruno Hoffmann, the most celebrated modern exponent, play his version of Franklin’s glass armonica. The sound was unforgettable – piercing, melancholy, otherworldly. And we have not mentioned the ...”

“... When Richard Sorge was hanged in Sugamo prison in Tokyo, on 7 November 1944, I was still a student and I regret that I never had occasion to take a drink or three with that wit, charmer, womaniser, tosspot, home-wrecker, author, journalist and master Soviet agent. I had better luck with my friend Kim Philby, Sorge’s only serious rival (that we know of) for the title Spy of the Century ...”

“... alignment,’ she is told, ‘but you are in constant danger of falling on your face.’ She took English, art, French and botany and worried constantly about her workload, complaining that she has ‘to keep on like the White Queen to stay in the same place’. When she got a B- in her first English paper, it made her feel ...”

“... Negotiating the commercial treaty of 1860 with France, Richard Cobden, he later revealed, felt ‘humiliated’ by the contrast between the rational system of measurement in force across the Channel and the weird complication of its British counterpart. Metrication and decimalisation would not only smooth the conquering path of British commerce but contribute to the harmony of nations ...”

“... them into a lot of adolescent males talking balls, the careers of Novalis, Oken and their English version, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, give reasons for contentment. For those interested in other things (of which failure and confusion may form part), one important focus is the scientific centre of much Romantic thought. For Romanticism may one day be ...”

“... of luminaries mostly patronised each other). When Sayre entered Harvard in the Fifties to study English, the New Criticism was in the ascendancy. ‘For us the arts were severed from society,’ she writes of her generation, ‘and I would have been astounded if I’d been asked to see a kinship between them.’ In ...”

“... novel, The Master and Margarita, written between 1928 and 1940 and now available in four different English translations, a character loses his head – literally. He slips on a Moscow street and is hit by a tram. His last thought is ‘Can this be?’ and his severed head then bounces away across the cobblestones. The question and the grisly performance of an ...”

“... He starts with a snapshot of interwar football, when international encounters were still few and English players enjoyed such unquestioned primacy that one German soccer writer referred to them as ‘a sort of Übermenschen’. ‘It was during the 1930s that football became politics,’ Kuper claims, though he provides few instances. His discussion of the ...”

“... Isaac Babel said, ‘it would write like Tolstoy.’ The remark is quoted at the head of Richard Pevear’s introduction to this handsome new translation of War and Peace. I should like to think Babel meant that if the world was given to intricate thematic contrasts and parallels among its materials, to careful cross-cutting between city and ...”