“... It was in touch with flourishing literary cultures to the north and south. One Warden of the English East March, Lord Hunsdon, a fierce and effective commander, a hanger and a swearer, and a patron of actors, was destined to be in touch with Shakespeare: reputedly the son of Henry VIII, he was also, I notice, the keeper of the woman claimed by A.L. Rowse ...”

“... would-be Modernists who came to hear Frank Lloyd Wright were encountering their first authentic English-speaking Modern pioneer. Wright knew Europe well, by the standards of the pre-aviation age; his first visit had been in 1909. Only two years before the London lectures, he had passed through again on his way to the Soviet Union to inspect the enormous ...”

“... Has Two Faces when Barbra Streisand, playing a frumpy, unconditionally lovable Columbia University English professor, has a makeover and flaunts her cleavage before her astounded class. ‘Okay, so the teacher has breasts,’ she wisecracks to the gaping students. ‘Anything wrong with that?’ Well, no, so long as they don’t get caught in the slide ...”

“... set for European unity. An early version of the EEC was dubbed the ‘Union Charlemagne’ by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in his 1950 speech accepting the inaugural Charlemagne prize, awarded by the city of Aachen every subsequent year to those who have advanced the cause of European unity. Receiving the award in 2018, Emmanuel Macron employed a ...”

“... 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 ...”