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“... Gaelic accidents’. There has been no better expression of the deeply Scottish suspicion that the English might be having more fun than we are. ‘Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on,’ the SNP’s Winnie Ewing announced after her shock victory in the 1967 Hamilton by-election, which sent the British government into a panic about the hitherto ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and purgatory. More radical religious articles were briefly promulgated, and a Bible in English made available to all, though soon the Six Articles and King’s Book put forward a much more Catholic view of religion, and in 1543 reading the Bible was restricted by law to the higher social groups. More definitely Protestant measures were adopted in ...”

“... in folds of red velvet and a background balustrade, and behind it some generic, dull afternoon English parkland. By such means ‘His Majesty’s picture drawer’ supplied a lofty ‘whole-length’ – probably intended for the gallery of a German palace in order to seal some alliance – in 1628. Portrait of Charles I and Henrietta Maria by Van Dyck ...”

“... the category we have come to know, and take for granted, as ‘public opinion’. In the 1970s, Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man made Habermas’s argument more concrete and detailed: late 17th and 18th-century coffee houses ‘naturally were places where speech flourished’. When a man went into one, he paid an entrance fee of a penny, was told ...”

“... dearth led to the famous remark that England was ‘das Land ohne Musik’, the title of an anti-English polemic written in 1904 by the German bohemian Oskar Schmitz. By that point, as Paul Serotsky has remarked, ‘this was already no longer true. However, when the idea – that England was the only cultured country without its own music – was first ...”

“... of the man stays stamped on his photographed features till the end – strongly marked in Richard Avedon’s famous portrait of 1969. Vera passes photographically through the book like royalty, always exuding grace, joy and beauty. Igor’s snapshot of her by a lake in Wiesbaden in 1930 is particularly fetching, with the remote glow of a legend. The ...”

“... some pages to arguing that perceptual experiences cannot justify beliefs. In his contribution, Richard Rorty categorises Davidson as significantly close to the American pragmatists. Rorty lists four theses he says are common to Davidson and a pragmatist such as William James. The fourth thesis states that there is no point to debates between realism and ...”

“... so were complex, subtle and consistent, and his reputation has accordingly never stood high in the English-speaking world. Fortunately, we now have a wonderful guide to his thought, in English, by the late Jacques Roger. Buffon’s compendium is a true natural history: a compilation of facts about the form, habits and ...”

“... nonetheless used to produce vast quantities of text. The late Michael Clanchy estimated that the English royal government put out around thirty thousand documents a year as early as the second half of the 12th century. Using the ingenious method of calculating the expenditure on the wax used to seal documents, Clanchy found that the number of documents ...”

“... Until this point, no distinction had been made between the constitution and the law. The English constitution contained three key elements: the prerogatives of the Crown, the privileges of parliament and the liberties of the subject. Lawyers’ claims about the relative importance of these elements remained contentious: indeed, this is what the ...”

“... or not to break it off. So he sought advice in a distinctively modern way: he wrote to Ruth English, agony aunt of Everybody’s, a weekly tabloid. Advice columns very quickly became common in British newspapers and magazines in the late 1930s. Though the concept of the agony aunt extended as far back as the 17th century, it took the launch of the ...”

“... church. A mile or so beyond looms a larger sight that Rodinsky was spared: the 52 floors of Richard Seifert’s Natwest Tower, double-decker lifts, automatic window-washing facilities and all. Here again was the characteristic frisson of the zone of transition, where different worlds rub up against one another, languages intersect on every corner and ...”

“... he was out to take possession of them. The Dunciad, one of the darkest yet most ebullient poems in English, was to be the bestiary for his literary foes. Passages marked up in the British Library volumes were duly to re-emerge as footnotes to the poem. (They are thickest among the writings of Pope’s lifelong enemy, John Dennis: ‘high voiced and never ...”