“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... time, by deposing John and inviting Prince Louis of France, soon to be Louis VIII, to assume the English throne, they were insisting that the king’s rule was conditional on good behaviour and the Great Council had the right to depose an unjust monarch. This menacing proviso too lurked in the background throughout Henry’s reign, surfacing for example in ...”

“... of their argument and the dramatic purpose of their work. Anyone over forty who went to an English public school where Confirmation Classes, the Cadet Corps and O-Level History were unshakable elements of the natural order will remember the Whig Interpretation. Schoolroom history began with the proposition that the Stuart kings were a bad lot, given to ...”

“... extended far beyond Cambridge, and even beyond the schools in which his loyal followers taught English and from which, if they could, they sent their pupils to Downing College for more advanced indoctrination by the master or his acolytes. As a provincial student in the late Thirties I was scolded for impudently and prematurely imitating his ...”

“... than any other film he had ever made. Brief Encounter, however, is something else again. As Richard Dyer points out in his excellent BFI book on the film, it is the awkwardness of the main characters, played by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, their touching, strangling inability either to deny their feelings or fully act on them, that makes them so ...”