“... but exhilaratingly willing to enjoy variety in landscape and in peoples. The best thing about Richard Jenkyns’s book is its readiness to shift critical attention away from Virgil’s politics towards his treatment of places and their relation to history. As he shows, place in Virgil is charged with emotion, with complex political affiliations, and with ...”

“... and defensive preface, written for the edition of 1972, she states her dissatisfaction with the English tradition and asserts that no 19th-century novel by an English writer could claim the same sort of success as that enjoyed by Stendhal and Tolstoy. George Eliot, she finds, is disqualified by her morality. Doris Lessing ...”

“... Hilliard describes in A Matter of Obscenity as ‘the most famous self-inflicted wound in English legal history’. There is plenty of competition for that distinction, starting with Oscar Wilde’s ‘Oh dear, no, he was a particularly plain boy.’ Griffith-Jones, who regularly advised the director of public prosecutions on possible obscenity ...”

“... In 1972 Auden had largely entrusted the selection of the pieces to Edward Mendelson, then a young English professor at Yale, thus launching him on a series of heroic editorial tasks which, 43 years later, is still not finished. As an editor, Mendelson is meticulous, judicious and quite extraordinarily thorough: in addition to tracking down all of Auden’s ...”

“... One might have called Hunter’s old-fashioned, were it not for the fact that bookshops in the English-speaking world had barely changed in two centuries. Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland, eagerly seeking the latest ‘horrid’ Mrs Radcliffe volumes in Bath, or Clarissa Dalloway, gazing disdainfully into Hatchard’s window in Piccadilly, would have ...”

“... the brutality of subjugation, but the relationship between rulers and ruled. In his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill took up the theme: ‘For nearly three hundred years Britain, reconciled to the Roman system, enjoyed in many respects the happiest, most comfortable and most enlightened times its inhabitants have had.’ More recently, it has ...”

“... runs he used to chat to his competitors, which some took for friendliness, others arrogance. Both Richard Askwith and Rick Broadbent have gone through the archives and spoken to those who knew Zátopek – particularly his wife, Dana, an Olympic gold-medal-winning javelin thrower – in order to tell his story in unprecedented detail. Zátopek was born in ...”

“... non-fiction intermingle outside the ambit of the novel. Francis Spufford is an almost parodically English figure whose output includes a cultural history of polar exploration (I May Be Some Time, 1996), a memoir of childhood reading (The Child that Books Built, 2002), a study of various unsung successes of postwar British science (Backroom Boys, 2003) and a ...”

“... appear in texts from the period already carry a whiff of nostalgia. But a new book co-authored by Richard Rastall and Andrew Taylor sheds some light on the ways they worked and lived. Rastall and Taylor begin by explaining what minstrels were (no simple task). The word comes from the Anglo-Norman menestral, which could refer to a travelling musician or ...”

“... Huns in the fifth century, and Joan of Arc, who inspired the liberation of France from the English in the 15th century. His appreciation did not extend to anyone foreign, least of all Free France’s Anglo-American allies, who had done most of the fighting from the Normandy beaches to Paris but were not invited to the parade: apart from a few foreign ...”

“... as a ‘Tory gain’. The voters came to recognise a party that – for all its pronounced English nationalism – seemed ill at ease not only with the nation as it was, but also with some of the longstanding varieties of Tory belief hitherto found within the Conservative Party itself. Yet despite the scale of the Blair victory in 1997, the ...”

“... far beyond the circle of their professional colleagues. One such is the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Significantly, Dawkins’s books defy classification in terms of our specialist categories: professional monograph, student text, popular book, etc. The Selfish Gene (1976) was at once a key document of the so-called ‘sociobiological ...”

“... It is useful to be able to see this essay again in the company of Eliot, Tate and, above all, Richard Ellmann, whose 1954 elucidation of A Vision restored a balance to the discussion of Yeats’s ideas which the pseudo-Augustan iconoclasm of Yvor Winters was not sufficient to upset. Elizabeth Cullingford’s selection of essays on the poems of 1919-1935 ...”

“... place in Marin County, California – ‘the golden land’ – in 1975, and many of those whom Richard Levine talked to claimed to have seen it coming, since it was well-known that Mrs Olive and her adopted daughter hated each other. Being a minor at the time, Marlene served only three years in a Youth Authority institution, and, now at liberty, has ...”

“... as an engraver and his extreme credulity. Even Blake was sceptical of his fervent devotion to Richard Brothers, the self-appointed Prince of the Hebrews and Nephew of the Almighty, and to Joanna Southcott, the putative mother of the Messiah. None of this affected Sharp’s career, nor his ability to turn out masterly reproductive engravings of the best ...”