“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on the Austrian resistance; but he has done little else. Another account of the controversy – Richard Evans’s In Hitler’s Shadow – is better informed, and more perceptive. Professor Evans shows in abundantly documented detail how the arguments the embattled historians are advancing ‘are derived, consciously or unconsciously, from the propaganda of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and complex treatise full of ambiguity and complex allusion, a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the misrepresented. None of his heroes will be acknowledged in The Oxford Companion to English Literature – except Robert Aickmann (sic) who gets his name misspelled, and he is banished to the ghetto: ‘See ghost stories and horror’. Seabrook’s disinterested championship of Aickman lasted for years and carried him to an interview with ...”

“... The best-known publication date in English literature,’ says Michael Mason of 1798. But the terse, intelligent Introduction to his new edition of the Lyrical Ballads seems out to disperse the sense of unique significance sticking to the year. Mason points out that the original version of 1798, which was anonymous, caught on less well than the second (1800), twice as long, and firmly attributed to Wordsworth alone ...”

“... 1848 required that every citizen should have 14 cubic metres of fresh air. As in so much else, the English led the field in the provision of taps and water closets. Baths and bidets slowly caught on. Meanwhile the pleasures of olfaction reached the heights of super-refinement we associate with Huysmans. Yet the crowd remained obstinately ‘loyal to ...”

“... in 1973 continue to work in the light of these discoveries: the Academy of Ancient Music, the English Concert, the Taverner Consort and Players, and the Tallis Scholars (which I started as a choir in Oxford while I was an undergraduate there). The first two concentrated on instruments only; the Tallis Scholars worked with voices only; and the Taverner ...”

“... 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 ...”