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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in his disenchantment with this freedom. Little wonder, since his life, pleasingly chronicled by Richard Vanderbeets, began in St Petersburg amid aristocratic Anglo-Russian relatives whose licensed eccentricities would have spoiled anyone for Hollywood. ‘From his great carved bed’ – this was a favourite uncle at play – ‘a .22 calibre pistol in his ...”

“... leader. The connection is clearest in his prison letters, now published in their entirety in English for the first time. Arrested after anti-Fascist action was declared illegal in November 1926, Gramsci wasn’t actually tried until June 1928, when he was found guilty of ‘conspiratorial activity, instigation of civil war, justification of crime and ...”

“... spend in opposition. Roy Jenkins’s Asquith, Anthony Crosland’s reflections on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in ...”

“... Richard Rorty has made us familiar with the distinction between two sorts of philosophy, which he calls ‘systematic’ and (I think infelicitously) ‘edifying’. The first sticks to the central epistemological tradition, which assumes that it can deal systematically and progressively with reality; the second is essentially of the periphery, and its exponents are pragmatical opponents of the institutional tradition ...”

“... degree, are now the ‘Huns’. They commit atrocities, murdering babies and kicking captured English officers and gentlemen in the behind. So let pictures of such actions be prepared by artists and hung up in every munitions factory. ‘When Miss Cavell was shot we should at once have shot our three leading prisoners. When Captain Fryatt was murdered we ...”

“... at a once familiar corner. Part of it was gone. The Walgreen’s drug store where, as teenagers, Richard and I had tormented Louie, was gone, replaced by a huge, white, faceless department store, as was the jewellers where I had stood for hours desperately wanting those hideous rings with heavy red and purple stones in them. In almost every other way ...”

“... at the end of his Wars of the Roses tetralogy: while Henry VII may have been as murderous as Richard III, he was nothing like as charming. Francis Bacon was ready to praise Henry’s politic wisdom in the 1622 biography that was to frame perceptions of the king until late in the 20th century, but he could not disguise the price of Henry’s determination ...”

“... Of the thousands​ of people who visited the Buckinghamshire astrologer-physician and clergyman Richard Napier around the beginning of the 17th century, many were troubled by questions of sleep. The mother of 11-year-old Susan Blundell told Napier that her daughter was ‘now given mutch to sleeping’, and that two days before, she had slept ‘the space of 24 houres but that her sleepe was interrupted with her usuall fites & that very often ...”

“... is simple and touching, the Quatre chansons françaises as fecund as anything written by the young Richard Strauss. Perhaps inside every 14-year-old boy there is a mature mezzo soprano struggling to get out. Certainly there was in the young Benjamin Britten, and he knew how to give expression to her. Where did this exuberantly released energy go to? It can be ...”