“... a leading article in the Times in March 1890 which called for a new gallery that ‘should do for English art what the Luxembourg does for the French’. The Museum of Modern British Art at Millbank, to give its original title, was meant to do exactly that, but hardly had it been founded than the model began to seem inadequate. A demand developed for a fuller ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”