“... 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 ...”

“... answer to the last question was that Wilde made the mistake of becoming ‘court jester to the English’. Although Joyce praised Wilde for his distinctive qualities of ‘keenness, generosity and a sexless intellect’, he aligned him with Sheridan, Goldsmith and Shaw in seeing him as a clown figure. The implied parallel is with Tom Moore, that paradigm ...”

“... tales of terror. It’s common to think of Blackwood’s as a stolid redoubt of middlebrow English respectability, the kind of torpid organ invoked by Orwell in ‘England Your England’: ‘If you were a patriot you read Blackwood’s Magazine and publicly thanked God that you were “not brainy”.’ Stevenson reminds us that the magazine wasn’t ...”

“... 1933, remembered leaving a café with Pessoa, and walking with him for a few blocks. Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, ‘this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he disappeared around the corner of a downtown street, had really disappeared, and would be nowhere in sight were he to run after him’.In 1934, a year before his death, Pessoa began a ...”

“... These five books represent something of a cross-section of current work on Tudor and Stuart English history, and they give a picture of how fundamentally the agenda for discussion in this field has changed over the past twenty-five years. Yet the point they mark in the development of the subject is not a total revolution: it is a sort of historiographical 1654, a mood in which the interesting question is seen to be, not whether the new approaches are valid, but how much of the old may be seen to have survived their onslaught ...”

“... the fact that nearly two-thirds of those who consulted the 17th-century astrological physician Richard Napier for treatment of their mopish or melancholic moods were women, one must set the observation that, as best one can judge from the admittedly defective data, men greatly outnumbered women among the inmates of 18th and early 19th-century madhouses. It ...”

“... I did with Nicholas Hytner, the ‘shocking’ revelation that I don’t read much contemporary English fiction and all the tired old stuff about treason that I’ve been saying since 1988 and A Question of Attribution. ‘It’s great,’ says Daniel (who’s off to Cuba next week), ‘that you can still piss people off however old you are.’18 May. Once ...”

“... lies an important earlier collection, the work published in 1972, edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, as Household and Family in Past Time. This book established the remarkable constancy of average household size in England since the 16th century, despite people’s mobility, with a norm of a little under five persons until the low birth rate and ...”

“... alone to Massachusetts, ignoring X’s objections, to take up a job in a small college’s English department. More recently, he has started visiting a palm reader: ‘Where else, on a windy day in January, can you drive out beset by blue devils and in five minutes be semi-reliably assured by a relative stranger that you are who you think you are, and ...”

“... the history of New England while seeming to embrace it. It seeks to draw visitors into a cocoon of English colonial history, memorialising the arrival and settlement in 1639 of a band of Puritans under the leadership of the Reverend Henry Whitfield. State and local authorities have legislated for the preservation of numerous buildings, four districts and the ...”

“... and he is especially well versed in the debates surrounding the causes and character of the English Civil War – for so long one of the consuming preoccupations of both professional historiography and national self-definition. What’s more, his research has been assiduous not just in the sources (many of them unpublished) bearing directly on Hill’s ...”

“... yet somehow distinctive, relatively easy to identify (Norman Foster, along with his former partner Richard Rogers, is English for Architecture). No wonder corporate and political leaders hire this stylish practice: there is a mirroring of self-images here, at once technocratic and innovative, that suits client and firm ...”