“... oral culture: folk songs, riddles, Anansi stories and especially the Psalms and Proverbs of the King James Bible. Johnson recalls these biblical cadences blending into the rhythms of everyday speech, and later into the language of reggae and dub poetry.In November 1963, Johnson went to join his mother, who had emigrated to England to work as a ...”

“... St Mark’s is, as they say, Ruskin’s epiphany, and one of those who have best said it – Richard Stein, in The Ritual of Interpretation – is drawn just here to the word which McEwan so much needs, ‘ritual’. Again, it is in pondering Venice that Ruskin is driven to seize and to elaborate that distinction between the true grotesque and the false ...”

“... Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the English Spirit’, ‘the making of a tradition’ etc. (They come thickest, it is true, in the ...”

“... if one says – and nearly every reviewer says this kind of thing at least once a week – that King Lear is a good play and The Four Just Men is a good thriller, what meaning is there in the word “good”?’ His real beef was that too regular, too poorly paid employment could turn good reviewers bad. Cut to the present day: ‘In a cold but stuffy ...”

“... brought back from Patagonia – quite differently from the young Coleridgean anatomist Richard Owen. This divergent ‘reading’ reflected not only his distinct style of science – he was a field naturalist and Owen a museum anatomist – but also his evolutionary understanding (on which he was implacably opposed by the romantic ...”

“... is caught and let loose for the pleasure of chasing it down again. With every chorus Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel lift their voices and then abandon them, stranding their words right at the edge of a cliff, suspending the sound in dead silence until the next verse begins. It’s a stark, shuddering effect, the pleasure cut like a heater in a cheap hotel ...”

“... Hall, American Graffiti, Star Wars, Harold and Maude, Two-Lane Blacktop, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Badlands. These are the movies reviewed by Lane that he lists: Indecent Proposal, Sleepless in Seattle, Speed, Wolf, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, Braveheart, The Bridges of Madison County, Crash, Con ...”

“... and the crumbling of services on a scale that would have gladdened the ruralist heart of a Richard Jefferies. Five years ago, Roy Porter still diagnosed ‘a downward spiral of infrastructural and human problems that will prove hard to halt’. Yet now, when London has slipped way down the table of city-sizes and tours round the eerie magnificence of ...”

“... that the affairs of the borough are not decided in the borough; but that a man belonging to the king, an intendant, administers them, alone and at a distance.’ Conversely, an 18th-century burgher visiting a 12th-century town would find a model of local self-government. ‘The burghers tax themselves, elect their magistrates, judge and punish, and assemble ...”

“... wrote a fulsome poem for the front of the book, paid for its publication, presented it to the King, and reviewed it in the Royal Society’s journal, which he himself edited. He made a profit of at least £10 out of the sales of the book. Few others got a look behind the scenes of this amazing work. Its impenetrability, and that of its author, became ...”

“... College, the site of his earlier joke about the horse that goes round and round the statue of King Billy on College Green. Apart from its obvious use as an image of political paralysis, the obsessive circular motion refers us back to Ferguson again, who wrote an essay ‘On the Ceremonial Turn, Called Desiul’. This is the Irish word ...”

“... convention that can be irritating when it is clear that a perfectly ordinary individual, not a king or even a newspaper, is speaking. American reviewers had a good model in Edmund Wilson’s unaffected prose. The tone of English criticism varied from Ezra Pound’s egotistical shouting to the confident elegance of the Sunday paper reviewers, and, in ...”

“... the category we have come to know, and take for granted, as ‘public opinion’. In the 1970s, Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man made Habermas’s argument more concrete and detailed: late 17th and 18th-century coffee houses ‘naturally were places where speech flourished’. When a man went into one, he paid an entrance fee of a penny, was told ...”

“... compiled the largest herbal of the 16th century. John Parkinson, who was appointed apothecary to King James, acquired the title of Botanicus Regius Primarius after the publication of his massive folio on the nature and properties of plants, Paradisi in Sole (1629). Both men provided themselves with coats of arms and salaries to match. Neither was quite as ...”

“... it’s fuzzy, sometimes it’s a matter of perspective. Does my daughter believe that the king is the head of state? Well, does that require her to distinguish the state from the government? Or that she understand how the United Kingdom differs from Great Britain? Determining what someone believes is often more like determining whether Hamlet is an ...”