“... 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 ...”

“... had discovered to his profit early in his publishing career, purchase volumes of model letters in English, replete with flourishes and sentiments often alien to the sender, but part nevertheless of the rhetorical currency required for any respectable courtship or commercial transaction. As a boy, Philip Sidney – whose works Richardson was later to ...”

“... as he did. The same is true of his strange, half-envious, half-disapproving relationship with Richard Crossman, a Winchester and New College contemporary. After they left Winchester, Crossman was Jay’s closest confidant. But he let him down over an arrangement to share digs, and the shock to Jay was so ‘stunning’ that they did not speak again for ...”

“... all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took ...”

“... running his own defence and who died before judgment was given. Armatta dedicates her book to Sir Richard May, an English circuit judge who presided over the trial until just before the end of the prosecution case in February 2004, and died shortly afterwards. Despite this, most of her critical comments are directed at the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Cooking Pot’), after a Paris bistro that had fed the defenders of the barricades. An English observer remembered that the new Marmite ‘was situated on the top floor of so wretched a building that there was no place for a staircase … the room was reached by means of a ladder with a very greasy rope … But here any refugee who could prove that ...”

“... initiative), and in all the metropolitan and scientific settings you might expect. The English £10 note has borne Darwin’s picture on the back since 2000 (replacing Dickens), but special postage stamps and a new £2 coin honoured him in 2009, as did stamps or coins in at least ten other countries.Darwin had an anniversary Facebook group ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”