“... why not eating might seem the only thing left for you to do. Catherine loves is set in a narrower English world where not all the problems are psychological ones. Catherine’s mother takes her with her when she goes to live with Tony, her lover. A baby comes and she returns to her husband: Catherine gives to the new baby the affection no one else seems able ...”

“... early 1930s championed by Nikolaus Pevsner, the most conservative of progressives, who described English architecture of the 1950s as ‘not the functionally best solution, nor an economically justifiable solution, nor acceptable in terms of townscape’. Early on, conventionally enough, the practice entered competitions, some for high-vis projects, but more ...”

“... page he mentions Elon Musk’s Hyperloop projects, which have their origins in the work of the English engineer Eric Laithwaite, whose promising trials of magnetic levitation were shortsightedly thwarted by the Heath government’s withdrawal of funding. Maglev might have become a commercial reality had Laithwaite, like so many of his ...”

“... has expanded to take in other genres, but his hunting ground – or boneyard – is still popular English fiction from about 1880 to 1950, in particular the magazine stories which were an important source of income for writers of that period. So far, this year, Rafael Sabatini and E.F. Benson have been given the benefit of one of his handsome and scholarly ...”

“... persona” was at issue,’ he is simply mistaken, in part no doubt because he views the English scene from across the Atlantic. The sales were large because the book was a Left Book Club selection, disliked by many members, and you could have attended many literary gatherings in pre-war London without hearing the Orwell persona mentioned. Nor is it ...”

“... Fréa gave up a job in publishing to protest at Fairmile. Dale gave up nursing and Richard gave up managing a mental health phone-line. Many sign on, but many others choose not to. Going against the grain of consumerism, these renunciants have discovered that there can be power in poverty. At the Rio Earth Summit, a US delegate warned that ...”

“... as an adjective for his music. Indeed, one of the endearing and perhaps enduring qualities of the English composers whose names have registered on the public since 1900 – Elgar, Walton, Britten, Tippett – is their essential conservatism – their instinctive preference for working with the grain rather than against it, notably in their respect for the ...”

“... which combined the worst excesses of the American academic style with an uncertain approach to the English language. These defects provided an almost impenetrable disguise for the personality of a man who has now revealed himself to be not only an intelligent interpreter of events but also humorous and sympathetic, and an excellent raconteur. It is possible ...”

“... climax of Browning’s strangest poem, a horn-player greets his fate undaunted by Death or Middle English Philology. Weary of questing and pestered by visions, Childe Roland reaches the Dark Tower with the names of fallen comrades ringing in his ears. The hills encircle him like sprawling giants. His death seems certain ...”

“... jazz; they were aspiring poets presented to Auden by Nevill Coghill, Merton Professor of English Literature. Garfitt made love to a succession of girls on the mattresses, not many of whom seem to have been undergraduates after the first, Su, who we guess is doomed as soon as we’re told she’s reading chemistry. Young beauties blow through Oxford ...”

“... according to the indictment – whether he accepted that Henry was now the earthly head of the English church, and replied: ‘I will not meddle with any such matters.’ A letter More wrote to his favourite daughter, Margaret Roper, confirms that he had said this, and that he had also said that he would not ‘dispute king’s titles nor pope’s, but the ...”

“... man who became her second husband, John McHale, she was largely forgotten in Britain. The sculptor Richard Smith, and McHale himself, suffered similar neglect after leaving the UK.By the time I visited her, Cordell’s memories of the 1950s were patchy. For long stretches we said little. She smoked Carlton 100s and showed me a few collages by McHale that she ...”

“... Their friendship continued, with some alarming contact with a blood-and-nation group called the English Mistery and the offer by an emissary of the Duke of Devonshire of the safe Tory seat of Eastbourne, until the Hoare-Laval Pact sent John off to the left. He went to the House of Commons to tell Nancy of his defection. ‘She was sure,’ he says, ‘I ...”

“... dealing with how an encounter of this kind ought to be conducted, taking us through a Middle English poem called The Gast of Gy (‘The Ghost of Guy’), in which a dead husband comes to his wife’s bedroom to haunt her – his own pains are largely unrelieved, but he induces in her a terrified anticipation of her penance for a sin against nature they ...”

“... values can be shared by, say, Leon Brittan, even though his ancestors were hardly of ‘pure’ English stock.) The difference is precisely one of unquestioned and institutionalised racism: if Nakasone believes what he preaches, and there is no reason to assume that he does not, he is in effect a racist. The theoretical context of the Japanese ...”