“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... There was even rain ‘Yorkshiring down with vertical vengeance’. Myers’s first proper novel, Richard (2010), was about the Manic Street Preachers lyricist and guitarist Richey Edwards, who went missing after leaving a London hotel in 1995 on the eve of the band’s US tour. Two weeks after his disappearance, his car was found at a motorway service ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of society is complete nonsense. He was the most upstanding, traditional upholder of everything English and everything Establishment.’ My own experience suggests otherwise. Long before I met him, Peter was intrigued and outraged at the hanging of James Hanratty for the 1961 A6 murder. When I took the case up in the late Sixties he bombarded me with ...”

“... also talks in sentences. With so much in the balance, not doing so is a minor sin, but can the English language survive another Bushwhacking? The difference between ‘peacemaker’ and ‘pacemaker’, a typical mangling of words on the campaign trail, is not ‘only’ a matter of language. Nor are the names of foreign countries and leaders. Apparently ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... authenticity’. This demonstration of ‘the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature’ is as baleful as it is irresistible. Ellis would call this representation a travesty. He remembers Leavis the teacher as lofty but ‘endlessly indulgent’. ‘I never heard him utter a harsh word.’ Admirers and antagonists agree ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... take it seriously. We find Kingsley on the golf-course, discussing the problem with his colleague, Richard Short, while they wait for ‘the brisk, serious teenagers’ of Edinburgh to finish with the hole before them. Short says: ‘You’re on a real winner. Even if it is a total red herring, spontaneously resolving cancer is big news. The press will be on ...”

“... he has been affected by Miroslav Holub, whom he greatly admires, and who can sound like this in English: Inside there may be growing An abandoned room, Bare walls, pale squares where pictures hung, a disconnected phone, feathers settling on the floor the encyclopedists have moved out and Dostoevsky never found the place Lost in a landscape Where only ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rhetoric only, but no one could be sure, and in the meantime Chamberlain was caricatured as the English Robespierre. A second comparison with Tony Benn also presents itself. Chamberlain, too, abandoned in middle age the politics of his youth. But where Benn was born again as a socialist, Chamberlain was a convert to imperialism. That ‘Radical Joe’ would ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”