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“... the Younger, almost skeletally lanky, nose pointed, chin receding, is the type of the aristocratic English silly ass; Napoleon, short, dark, goggle-eyed, that of the greasy wop in some Little England bestiary. But they are much more than stereotypes: each is also a portrait. Gillray’s genius for satiric likeness peoples his stage with human beings, not with ...”

“... Back in the Sixties, before he became the bad boy of American philosophy, Richard Rorty struck his colleagues as a safe and promising young man. His first book, published in 1967, was an anthology of Essays in Philosophical Method designed to document the reorientations in analytic philosophy that followed Rudolf Carnap’s move from Germany to the US in 1935 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... about the craft, if that is the right word, of highbrow reviewing as it does about Eliot. On the English side one notices a steady reduction in pomposity, signalled by the disappearance of the reviewer’s plural first-person pronoun – a harmless convention that can be irritating when it is clear that a perfectly ordinary individual, not a king or even a ...”

“... architectural dynasty, all church-builders and all linked to the long unfolding of that deeply English phenomenon, the Gothic Revival. Neither of the knighted Scotts has received the dues of a full study, though a good deal has been written about the omnipresent Sir Gilbert. This has much to do with the status of the Gothic Revival: a Betjemanic joke until ...”

“... and came downstairs, and made a careful decision about where to sit for the morning and read the English poets, or the harsh denunciations of war and capitalism that I had brought with me. On the second or third day, I noticed a girl of my age leap up from her chair, cross the road in front of the hotel, and walk rapidly towards the sea. She moved with great ...”

“... returned to the rich West, and able to talk passionately about it, in German, French and English. He had no interest in administration, and tested to breaking point the goodwill of his supporters, with what was either brilliant impulsiveness or selfish unreliability. He was huge in Switzerland, big in Germany and well known in France, but he never ...”

“... the book-jacket, is ‘to restore Hardy to his rightful place as the greatest and most versatile English author after Shakespeare’. In this crusade to return Hardy to his throne, Seymour-Smith does not grapple, as we might have expected, with the literary competition – with Dickens, Eliot or Lawrence – but rather with the alleged critical ...”

“... on the poet translated for her. Elaine Feinstein has been carrying the Tsvetaeva torch in the English-speaking countries for about two decades. Her volume of Tsvetaeva’s poetry in English, translated from line-by-line cribs, came out in 1971, was revised and expanded in 1981, and has now appeared in a third ...”

“... like Kipling, was never to be satisfied by a mere four books of Odes, and went on to write (in English) part of a fifth, over and above a splendid body of adaptations, translations and marginal notes. His friends piled in, and a Liber quintus was published in 1920, with enchanting Latin versions by A.D. Godley and others, and exhilarating touches of spoof ...”

“... academic) have what at first appears a straightforward project: to trace the path followed by English law for more than a millennium in categorising, criminalising and penalising treasonable acts. They conclude that treason as a crime has had its day: ‘Today, dangers inherent in the prosecution of treason manifestly outweigh the advantages, and the ...”

“... of the onerous tasks that would later be done exclusively by blacks. Political prisoners from the English Civil War were sent directly into West Indian slavery, and poorer whites were encouraged (by destitution, misleading advertising or organised kidnapping) to become field hands in Virginia and the Caribbean. By the end of the century, this had become ...”

“... Version of the Book of Psalms – and of course of the entire Bible – is so deep in the English language that we no longer know when we are repeating its phrases. Inextricable from the beliefs and practices of its faithful for four hundred years, it has been transformed from the translation of a holy book into a holy book ...”

“... pioneering head of espionage who saved the last Tudor monarch from assassination and protected the English state from invasion by foreign powers, and denigrated as a Machiavellian politician who masterminded a campaign of intimidation against Catholic missionary priests and engineered the downfall of Mary Queen of Scots by methods of the most dubious ...”

“... and corruption, by an opinion getting abroad that there was any knowledge of Shakespear or the English language except on the minister’s side of the question, would it not be the more absolutely incumbent on you as the head of the literary police, to arrest such an opinion in the outset, to crush it before it gathered strength, and to produce the article ...”