“... Hughes has a sense of his country’s history that goes much deeper than that of any other living English writer. His huge study of Shakespeare, more than ten years in the making, is an unprecedented act of critical witness that spills out of an energy – a tragic energy – which has all but disappeared from current professional critical practice. This ...”

“... of a capstone on a long scholarly career devoted to the history of education, running from his English Schools in the Middle Ages (1973) to Medieval Children (2001), and taking in thirty other studies listed in the bibliography, most of them the product of detailed archival research. It is accordingly rather a cheek for a reviewer to take issue with his ...”

“... The parish chaplain could not speak Welsh, yet ‘most parishioners there do not know the English language.’Throughout the 1920s, James and Bannister worked together to produce a catalogue of the manuscripts in the Hereford Cathedral library. But it was not until 1929 that Bannister published a transcription of the visitation book, in a series of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Richard Ellmann’s​ biography of James Joyce was first published in 1959 to an almost unanimously enthusiastic reception. Ellmann’s editor at the New York office of Oxford University Press told him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate ...”