“... 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 ...”

“... which rings through the book like the 13th chime of the clock – that where the old form of English trial was a truth-seeking process, albeit an inefficient one, the modern Anglo-American adversarial trial is dedicated to the suppression or evasion of the truth. ‘Adversary procedure,’ he says, ‘represented a material worsening of the truth ...”

“... an unusual place in the popular imagination. Since the first private publication in 1883 of an English translation – a project fronted by the Orientalising self-promoter Richard Burton – there have been a great number of illustrated versions. To many, the Kāmasūtra’s connection with India is almost ...”

“... by incontinent artillerists. Dr Phyllis Hembry re-creates in meticulous depth the heyday of the English spa, ending in the early 19th century when the fashion of sea-bathing was challenging the supremacy of the inland waters. Let us not forget the splendours of that heyday, in Bath: ‘The most fashionable library before 1800 was James Marshall’s in ...”

“... Young is the country’s most compelling sociologist. Not lower-middle-class in origin, not indeed English at all, but half-Irish and half-Australian, educated outside the normal rut at Dartington, and then, after a spell at Gray’s Inn, by Richard Titmuss at the LSE, free therefore of the resentment, deference, fantasy and ...”

“... and Metamorphosis – Charles Martindale, who protested at Tom Paulin’s review in the LRB, and Richard Swigg who many months ago answered Alistair Elliott’s more brutal review in the TLS – have every reason to wonder that Tomlinson should still solicit the suffrages of a public that shows him such ill-will. He must be, so it must seem, either ...”

“... Humberside spectacles, or, rather, in an idiom Dunn had first perfected for poems set in an English city. In Barbarians and St Kilda’s Parliament, the flat, witty harshness of the earlier volumes has given way to a more fondly nurtured and also more fanciful mode of feeling. The personal barriers to writing about Scotland seem to survive in a ...”

“... of the serious student of 19th-century sculpture. There exists no general introduction in English to what was produced in Germany or Italy. France is a different matter. Much of what was made between Houdon and Rodin has actually been admired for many years now: for instance, La Dance, Carpeaux’s festive group of girls with darting eyes and flashing ...”

“... directly through the circle. Stonehenge by then belonged to the Crown and has been administered by English Heritage since 1984, during which time it has been an almost constant subject of dispute. If, as the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes wrote, every age has ‘the Stonehenge it deserves – or desires’, the experience of the last forty years suggests an ...”

“... How many people in fact found Britain’s mainland colonies a land of opportunity? The late Richard Hofstadter suggested that the answer would almost certainly not sustain the success myth. In America at 1750: A Social Portrait, a wonderfully sensitive piece of writing, he observed that the servants as well as the slaves had been commodities, goods sold ...”

“... a canvasser for Greenpeace, then in a bookshop, and set himself the task of learning to write in English. When he arrived in America his English was school standard, but he learned quickly: three years later he published his first story, and there’s very little in The Question of Bruno that’s not worked and polished ...”

“... claim even the strongest poet can make than the one Keats made: that he ‘would be among the English poets’, construing ‘among them’ in a Bloomian way as ‘in the midst of them’, future poets living out of Keats’s pocket as he lived out of those of his precursors. Analogously, there is no stronger claim which even the superman can make than ...”

“... A Perfect Spy in 1986, Philip Roth, then spending a lot of time in London, called it ‘the best English novel since the war’. Not being such a fan of A Perfect Spy, I’ve occasionally wondered what Roth’s generous blurb says about the postwar English novel. As a le Carré bore, however, I’ve also wondered how Roth ...”

“... plenty of perjink signs saying ‘No Thanks’, stuck on privet hedges. My friends are Scots born, English born, Italian born. Why do I have to insist on that? Because of the constant bitching that the ‘Yes’ movement was simply ‘anti-English’. No one wanted to be alone that evening. We ate a carry-out curry and ...”

“... autumn I bought, at Deighton Bell in Trinity Street, a copy of George III and the Politicians by Richard Pares, a book I have still, my name written in it by a friend, as I disliked my handwriting then as I do now. It was a detailed, allusive book, demanding a more thorough knowledge of 18th-century politics than a schoolboy could be expected to have, but I ...”