“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Walter Espec did say anything of this sort, his words wouldn’t have meant much to his English levies. Some of it is simply false, such as the same-day defeat of both emperors (the events were in fact two years apart, in 1081 and 1083). But in an account of an Anglo-Norman expedition against Lisbon, in 1147, a similar speech is credited to Hervey ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Brian picks a brilliant selection of Desert Island Discs, Eno nominates for his beach read Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity; Brian is all weird eros, Eno makes music that can be oddly clenched or wafty; Brian is inspiringly playful, Eno writes software to systematise (and cage, and kill) that playfulness.Now aged 77, the two of them ...”

“... politely inquired: ‘Do you wish to pass me on the left or on the right?’ The incident, which Richard Boston recounts in his biographical memoir of Lancaster, captures something essential about a man who, as a cartoonist and writer excelled in capturing types, human and architectural, yet himself remained hard to typify. Georgian (Town) Pillar to ...”

“... Give me an English one!’ Matty Robinson said after tasting her first Indian curries in Bombay in 1858. She was 29, the eldest child of a Gloucestershire rector, and had gone to India as the wife of a British army officer, her cousin. As a third-generation Anglo-Indian, she was familiar with spicy food. Her problem was that the curries in India weren’t like the unsubtle curry-powder-laced stews she knew from home (in ‘A Poem to Curry’, written in 1846, Thackeray describes one made from three pounds of veal, three tablespoons of curry powder and half a pound of Epping butter ...”