“... 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 ...”

“... which he does very readably and well, but necessarily also to describe and evaluate aspects of English culture – revivalist painting, classical music in the Twenties and Thirties, the foundation of a native ballet, pop music in the Sixties – which he does with considerable confidence and resource. But when the book is read, one does not feel that a ...”

“... could be dismissed as not especially consequential. In Volcanoes: Crucibles of Change (1997), Richard Fisher, Grant Heiken and Jeffrey Hulen devote only half a sentence to it: ‘The dust cloud … lasted less than two years, and its effects upon the environment, though harmful to people, were short-lived.’ But Wood, who intends no hyperbole in his ...”

“... the most famous of all Celan’s poems. In August 1953 an American scholar called Richard Exner pointed out to Claire Goll certain similarities between Yvan Goll’s posthumous collection Traumkraut (1951) and Celan’s Mohn und Gedächtnis. Claire Goll wrote an open letter alleging plagiarism and at least one journalist supported and repeated ...”

“... idea of sex between him and Tennyson is impossibly far-fetched), and the few who weren’t (like Richard Monckton Milnes, mad about Hallam) shrank from the macho recklessness of the Spanish adventure. So there are no sodomites in Greene’s account, and the only coward, crank and sap-headed dilettante is John Sterling, the would-be mastermind of the whole ...”

“... psychiatrist who coined the term ‘anti-psychiatry’). But readers who have to rely on an English translation have had to wait almost four decades to get their hands on a complete version. In important respects the new translation does not disappoint: this is a much subtler, less sensationalist Foucault of 14 chapters as against nine, with numerous ...”

“... an Arriva bus and quits Leeds via Hunslet, which also appears more or less obliterated since Richard Hoggart, who described its working-class culture so memorably in The Uses of Literacy, grew up there. Next comes Woodlesford, where McKie gazes round for any trace of the rhubarb for which the place was once well known, and we chug onwards to ...”

“... at coherence imposed from above. Coherence came rather from the common understanding of the English national past (the ‘Whig’ interpretation of history in the strict sense) which was diffused through all levels of the cultural community – writers, teachers, readers. What made the series so successful was, above all, the colossal commercial ...”

“... the end of the month he was caught up in the Massacre of St Bartholomew, a cowering refugee in the English Embassy; whence he was rescued by a French nobleman who thought it amusing to take him with other voyeurs to inspect the mangled corpse of Admiral Coligny, lying where it had fallen on the cobbles. By this time he had made the acquaintance of some ...”

“... is remembered as an extraordinary episode in the life of Hector Berlioz. Appearing in the 1827 English theatre season in Paris, she took the city by storm – lithographs of her as the mad Ophelia were in every prinitshop window. Ladies of fashion demanded coiffure ‘à la Miss Smithson’ – a black veil with wisps of straw tastefully interwoven amongst ...”

“... to his strange relationship to tradition. He used and adapted the tone of the great masters of English eloquence: Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Emerson and Henry James. He brought, he wrote, ‘a special attitude’ to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral of Chartres, and to the Empire State Building . . . These were ...”