“... where John Barton coached members of the RSC in the ‘correct’ pronunciation of Shakespearean English: the accent sounded like a mixture of the Ambridge, Birmingham and Ulster accents. In 19, we hear not ‘phoenix’ but Phaenix, not ‘heinous’ but hainous, not ‘old’ but ould. Elsewhere there are other sounds still current in Ulster – cowld for ...”

“... Irina looks forward ‘to meeting a gentleman in a bowler hat like Mr Brown in my Let’s Talk English book, who looks supremely dashing and romantic, with his tight suit and rolled-up umbrella, and especially the intriguing bulge in his trouser-zip area.’ Andriy is enamoured of ‘Let’s Talk English Mrs Brown, with ...”

“... day, became the guarantee of philosophical rigour. Many authorities, especially outside the English-speaking world, took a more flexible view of the range of forces that might be involved in Earth history; but there is no doubt that Lyell’s denial of catastrophes was influential. By the middle of the 20th century, most experts viewed meteorite impacts ...”

“... on the door of mastery. ‘Blister my kidneys,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘if the music is not as English, as joyful, as tender as any lyric of all that noble host. Technique all right, and as to word setting – models.’ With bleak synchronicity, his maturity in composition arrived as war was declared. In February 1915, he enlisted as a private in the ...”

“... totally ‘innocent’; that masculine aggression is natural, or ‘boys will be boys’; that the English are an island race living in an island home, untouched by the foreign and thus righteously demanding exclusion of anything ‘alien’. Warner is very acute in catching British and American treatment of ‘aliens’ in various guises, including those ...”

“... words for mad states reproduced in Michael Macdonald’s Mystical Bedlam, a study of 17th-century English sources. Instead we have ‘mad’, ‘lunatic’, ‘melancholy’, ‘stubborn’, ‘suspicious’, ‘fancies and conceits’, ‘frightening dreams’. This disappearance of the Classical connection is intriguing, and paranoia’s reappearance in the ...”

“... study of the Florentine palace of the Renaissance along the lines of Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House. However, Goldthwaite has put his finger on an important problem, all the more important because the example of the Florentines was followed all over Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries. In Genoa, for example, where the palaces of the ...”

“... via the (mild) heresies of Hicks, James Meade and Roy Harrod rather than via the true belief of Richard Kahn or Joan Robinson. In any event, Keynes made no further important theoretical contribution to economics. The running was left to others. For Skidelsky, however, this is an unreal problem since the third volume is dominated by what he sees as the ...”

“... from his unpublished novel or unperformed plays; and as for gossip – wow! up in the class of Richard Aldington, particularly when the target is someone he doesn’t like. Alma Mahler is that ‘noisy, witless woman’ who ‘dominates the scene through boasting, greed and liquor’. At the funeral of her daughter Manon Gropius, she produces ...”

“... words and phrases. Such discussions could take place only at Oxford, I thought. It’s so English. People here are so intelligent.’ And these were just the students. Next he had to face the Master, heir to the fabled Jowett. At a welcoming interview, Mehta was asked, ‘Do you play games?’ and when he reminded the Master that blindness barred him ...”

“... it drew on still earlier work in social science (Sorokin, Andreski and Janowitz), social policy (Richard Titmuss’s rather naive equation of ‘the Dunkirk spirit’ with social reform, for example, is now very familiar) and Medieval studies. In the early Sixties at Edinburgh University, I launched special subjects on ‘The War and the Welfare State in ...”

“... the Russian art critic Ivan Lermolieff published Die Werke italienischer Meister (translated into English as Italian Painters), a study of the Italian artworks held in German collections. He disputed dozens of attributions to Renaissance artists in the state galleries of Munich, Dresden, Berlin and elsewhere. ‘It has been a very common mistake,’ he ...”

“... justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply. The ‘King of Bath’, as he liked to be known, was the gamester son of a Swansea bottlemaker, a heavyweight playboy whose abundant assurance, or chutzpah, had qualified him to act as arbiter of elegance ...”

“... emergence of blatant imperial boasting as a factor in British public affairs’. Calder adds that English literature had already been taking up the swelling theme of empire – a new book by John McVeagh has much to say about this. ‘How can one write the history of the English-speaking peoples and their empires?’ – a ...”

“... in the United States. In the New York Times Book Review, Caryn James observed that ‘while the English fuss about poets’ graves, Americans gossip about litigation and celebrity journalists.’Malcolm sees biographers and readers allied in a transgressive and titillating conspiracy against the dead. She writes that ‘the biographer at work ... is like ...”