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“... is a broader one which includes the lesser. It has to do with the role of the landed men in English life in a much more general sense, and represents a current reinter-pretational convergence. It is that the landed patricians were not seen off either in wealth or in power until late in the 19th century, and even then only over a further period of time ...”

“... died before he could finish the book, but the revision was more or less complete. Peter Burton and Richard Smith have added chapters on film, the gay scene and rock music, for which Baker had left notes. The result is not just about drag, nor yet about female impersonation, and doesn’t even confine itself to the performing arts. Besides the contemporary ...”

“... industrial squalor and urban overcrowding persists in the minds of public and planners alike,’ Richard Rogers and Anne Power argue in Cities for a Small Country, ‘and fuels an almost obsessive desire for low-density, suburban homes.’ What happened, they ask, to ‘the English love of cities’? Should we blame the ...”

“... is precisely the problem with his thesis. Such ‘slips’ were everywhere. According to Early English Books Online, ‘Fryday’ appears 613 times across 366 early modern texts. Collier’s double-d ‘undderstanding’ may look like ludic subversion (a ‘message-in-a-painted-bottle’), but the same spelling also appears in ...”

“... here the first seven chapters concern novels already partially rescued by inclusion in the Oxford English Novels/World Classics over the past twenty years. To make a proper assessment of the extent to which women’s contribution to the novel has been undervalued, one has to draw up an accurate chart of the male contribution. Spender tells us that her ...”

“... then would have swived the other sister both’. He fought for the invading Tudor forces against Richard III. Unsubstantiated legend has him as a standard-bearer at Bosworth, cut down close to the person of the man who would soon be king. Whatever the exact truth, he died a hero with a claim on the gratitude of the new regime. He did not leave much land for ...”

“... Leigh, the heroine remembers her childhood. Orphaned in Italy and educated by her aunt in an English country house, she was given pious tracts to read, learned some algebra and embroidered a shepherdess who was         lovelorn with pink eyes To match her shoes, when I mistook the silks; Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hat So strangely ...”

“... among 20th-century poets, is of a kind not natural in an age like this. Searching the history of English poetry for a writer of comparable national stature one is driven back to Milton, another apocalyptic revolutionary – at times the justifying voice of revolution, the apologist of a new republic, the commentator, sometimes eloquently bitter, on the great ...”

“... with acuity on Madison and Jefferson and on Jack Ruby (the assassin of Kennedy’s assassin) and Richard Nixon. He is the closest thing the New World has to a Chesterton or a Burke. Who better to reflect on the relationship of sin and power, of eros and daring, of charisma and catastrophe, than an American pilgrim whose journey has taken him from William ...”

“... recorded for the edification of the future and the gratification of the present. The puritanical Richard Ingrams, who neither smokes nor drinks, and lives a scandalously chaste life, appears to many like some rumpled, corduroy-jacketed Robespierre (though Robespierre was a sybarite by comparison, diluting his water with wine). How has this change come ...”

“... to the family farm, where there were no books and few children to play with. His younger brother, Richard, was a chip off the old block – ‘exuberant, outdoorsy, athletic’, everything John was not – and his father’s favourite. Richard died of leukaemia shortly before John turned 13 in 1940. A shadow descended on ...”

“... as was also the case with The Loft, which Quartet brought out in 2011. The current availability in English of Haushofer’s three most accomplished novels offers a chance to get to know this subtle and unusual writer. Haushofer didn’t wish her work to remain obscure, but that this has been its fate is all of a piece with her character. Anonymity answered to ...”

“... was simply not what attracted Brennan. The proof is in his unshaken capacity to compose with the English equivalent of the full poncif kit which his Gallic heroes thought of as something in the far past, back beyond the first night of Hernani. For Brennan such mannerisms should have been equally antediluvian. Nor can it be said that Brennan was merely ...”

“... a social call to a widow only to be told he’d buried her that morning. Brief glimpses of an English Dance of Death. These play more part in the notebooks than the events of Hardy’s life, and show how his sense of life, for all his affirmation that we are ‘inveterate joy-makers’, fed first and last off his sense of death. The many ghosts show it ...”

“... an essay in recreating the almost exhausted genre. We are back in that indefinable period when English society could still be epitomised in terms of Christmas parties around the fire in the Drawing Room, journeys through the fog in steam locomotives, and excursions with a pony and trap across a deserted marsh. As we are told at one point of ‘the sort of ...”