“... Dixon’s weak – or is it strong? – tear ducts. As he reminds us of the great tear-jerkers of English culture – Sydney Carton’s imagined speech from the scaffold, Nurse Cavell’s last words, Celia Johnson’s return to her husband in Brief Encounter – the allusions alone were enough to start my eyes pricking. Now and then Dixon may be a fraction ...”

“... been imported into the Anglo-British state in the form of the Freedom of Information Act. But, as Richard Norton-Taylor’s pugnacious book shows, it’s a newborn right still struggling to survive against a centuries-old tradition of government.The structure of the ‘British’ state is still essentially monarchical. Constitutionally, the rest of the ...”

“... these books are concerned with what the Spaniards once called the Felicissima Armada and what the English still, with a quiet smile, call the Invincible Armada (apparently it was Burleigh who first thought of the word, shortly after the event). They differ very much in approach, in emphasis, and even in conclusion – Mia Rodrigues-Salgado, for example, feels ...”

“... in their own oppression. However intensely Anglophone feminists debated The Second Sex, the English translation, by H.M. Parshley, did not become an issue until 1983, when Margaret Simons, a professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, drew attention to it in her essay, ‘The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir’. Beauvoir had ...”

“... accounts of Guevara’s impact on the conference, and his inconclusive private discussions with Richard Goodwin, one of Kennedy’s advisers. But this is well-trodden ground, and there is little new material. Many Latin American governments were still run by civilians, and under popular pressure to extend the hand of friendship to Cuba. But the American ...”

“... Brighton had several, and became the epitome of the beach. ‘You hear nothing and see nothing,’ Richard Jeffries wrote of Brighton’s beach in The Open Air (1885): It is perfectly comfortable, perfectly jolly and exhilarating, a preferable spot to any other. A sparkle of sunshine on the breakers, a dazzling gleam from the white foam, a warm sweet ...”

“... many of them violent. But the bit of plot there is takes us, finally, to an interesting place. Richard Cane, brilliantly played by Danny Huston, is an infinitely rich man who owns every technology and invention and effectively rules the world. We are no doubt supposed to think of whichever American billionaire we like least. The trouble is that although ...”

“... set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been ...”

“... for a writer to avoid this post-mortem critical lull is to die prematurely. In British university English departments there are currently more theses being written about Angela Carter (d. 1991) than about the 18th century. The relative status of Pound and Auden, two and a bit decades after their deaths, is testified to by two recent volumes of essays. Sons of ...”

“... the fourth and final volume of his 1700-page novel Anniversaries, which appeared in unabridged English translation only in 2018.* Johnson died at home in 1984, aged 49. His body lay undiscovered for almost three weeks, until the Napier’s landlords, worried by his absence from the pub, broke in and found him on his living-room floor. He had fallen while ...”

“... in about 1742, and was brought to England in 1750 by his first master, or ‘owner’, Colonel Richard Bathurst. He was probably baptised in England, though no record of this has been found. At Orange River, the sugar plantation where he spent his childhood, he was called Quashey, a very common slave name which he exchanged for a very ordinary-sounding ...”

“... began to produce books. In the library Kazin sometimes sat across from his friend the historian Richard Hofstadter, who was also writing his first book, and their simultaneous composition was also a form of becoming. The battle Kazin had all his writers fight in On Native Grounds was a battle against an uncaring America, a vast industrial civilisation. He ...”

“... in this last group were discussed in 1952 by J.K. Fuz in a pioneering work, Welfare Economics in English Utopias, to which Dr Davis refers only in a dismissive footnote. Davis also shows that Burton was an early advocate of something like a welfare state. This book reinforces our awareness of the problem of scarcity in 16th and early 17th-century ...”

“... his time between Germany and North America. Many of his writings have been translated, and the English version of his major work on Truth and Method has helped to extend his fame. His thought now enjoys a considerable vogue in the English-speaking world. Gadamer was born in Breslau at the turn of the century. His father ...”

“... To bring them up to date is no doubt the general editorial policy pursued in the Longman Annotated English Poets series, for which these are the first two volumes of a projected four-volume Dryden; and this seems right on the whole, although the italic and capitals of the original give it the zest and insinuation of a speaking voice, which is important to ...”