“... 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 ...”

“... In 1549, the West Country rose in rebellion against the first of Archbishop Cranmer’s new English liturgies, denouncing it as ‘a Christmas game’. Exeter was besieged, troops were sent against the rebels, half of them foreign mercenaries, many lives were lost, and the leaders, including some clergy, were strung up. To measure the distance ...”

“... the two generations of Romantic poetry. It did more than that, though: it caught a moment in English social and intellectual life, an engaging as well as a brilliant moment, and one that was about to pass. Distinctions that would soon harden into opposition, between art and science, art and commerce, professionals and amateurs, were still unclear, up for ...”

“... distaste for self-criticism’, as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet who could picture possible incest and a poisoning in The Bride ...”

“... a criminal, and probably by some way the most distinguished criminal ever to have won a place in English letters. Despite a reasonably secure and prosperous background in Warwickshire life, he quite suddenly began a career of violence by lying in wait, with 26 others, to murder Humphrey, Duke of Buckingham and Earl of Stafford, in 1450. The ambush failed, so ...”

“... clear and brisk, its iambic pentameter a zone of enchantment. ‘The vast majority of contemporary English translations of the Homeric poems render the regular metre of the Greek into prose or nonmetrical free verse,’ she says. Yet metre is the enduring relic of a time when poetry was entirely oral, performed for audiences, and if not strictly memorised then ...”

“... the post-war period, he has established himself as this country’s leading critic within academic English of the very concept of ‘Literature’. So much so, that he would have preferred to see English Literature replaced as a core subject in our school and university curriculum by the study of Culture and of ...”

“... American literature. It was French condescension that celebrated Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Richard Wright, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiel Hammett and James M. Cain, Beauvoir was told, when the United States had its own sophisticated tradition of internal, psychological exploration; she was witnessing the formation of the American Studies canon ...”

“... of madness and death’. It is indeed a striking and impressive work, which makes one hope for English translations of his two later novels, Concerning Heroes and Tombs (1961) and Abaddon the Exterminator (1974). The novel’s hero and narrator begins with the intriguingly insufficient statement that ‘it should be sufficient to say that I am Juan Pablo ...”

“... Sisman has now studied three: Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Briggs, leaving only Eric Hobsbawm to Richard Evans. Briggs’s widow, Susan, commissioned Sisman to write this Life, and in fact the man himself noted before his death in 2016 that if there had to be a biography, Sisman would be the right person to do it. The result is an elaborately detailed and ...”

“... made him king in more or less everything but name, the death of Oliver, the succession of his son Richard, the collapse of the Protectorate, and the Restoration of Charles II, all in the space of twenty years, might be forgiven for being confused about politics. As the journalist Marchamont Nedham put it in one of his ‘Letters from Utopia’ in 1657, There ...”

“... The​ Anglo-Saxon period of English history lasted more than six centuries, from the legendary arrival of Hengest and Horsa in Kent in 449 AD to the downfall of the last native dynasty at Hastings on 14 October 1066. It is the final event that has dominated the public imagination. Since Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848), ‘last of’ has been almost obligatory in book titles, picked up by Charles Kingsley in Hereward the Wake, Last of the English (1866), and continued more recently in Hebe Weenolsen’s The Last Englishman (Hereward again, 1951) and Julian Rathbone’s The Last English King (Harold again, 1997 ...”