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“... a strong and highly specific racial and national identity with a quite general human sympathy. Richard Wollheim’s essay,‘The Idea of a Common Human Nature’, is illuminating on several of these topics. Wollheim also makes the point that Berlin’s interest in the observable features of life, and his diffidence about claims to have discovered ...”

“... Emerson’s poems, Donald Davie’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (‘What piffle!’). Richard Ellmann’s Oxford Book of American Verse, Michael Holroyd’s Augustus John, Andrew Motion’s The Poetry of Edward Thomas (‘Am I to suppose this is how he talks to his students, poor sods?’). The fame of other writers Grigson takes as an ...”

“... spirit left to be broken. All this we should have known long ago. Think of the career of the great Richard Topcliffe, chief ‘poursuivant’ or persecutor of Jesuit missionaries in the reign of Elizabeth I. Topcliffe is perhaps not much spoken of except by historians of the Catholic martyrs or close students of Donne, who mentioned him in passing but deleted ...”

“... creditable. And here figure Mairi MacInnes, Miriam Levine (two), Gerry Loose, Paul Coltman, Richard Dankleff, Robin Ivy, Pete Morgan (two), Phyllis Koestenbaum, Barbara Moore, David MacSweeney (one out of two), Randall Garrison, Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and ...”

“... some of the real issues involved. ‘Without a doubt what had occurred to Liffey had occurred to Richard too – that once a wife is financially dependent, she is sexually dependent too.’ This is an issue that gets so far as to be formulated, but – in a context that includes puffballs and black magic, and another woman who cries into her typewriter, and ...”

“... Here not only the meaning of the term but also the influence of the policy is suggested. See Richard Cobden. This leads us to the Anti-Corn Law League, and in turn to John Bright. With Bright we can choose to go back to the League or, reading to the end of the entry, on to the Second Reform Bill (‘His subsequent career was a failure’). The entry on ...”

“... is anti-Toto. Americans can be indifferent to dogs, in representation or in the street – not the English. ‘Toto: that little yapping hairpiece of a creature, that meddlesome rug!’ He doesn’t like Glinda, the Good Witch, either; the Wicked Witch of the West receives his appreciative notice. This is the old, perhaps oldest, story: that of Satan ...”

“... of England, one of four children of a ‘critic’ and a mother who goes on to take a degree in English and become an admired poet. Her parents split up; both eventually remarry. ‘Jane’, like the real Jane, grows up in Brixton, goes to Oxford, and later works in publishing (for an unnamed but unmistakable Faber, down to the Kundera lookalike ...”

“... No essay in English has a better title than De Quincey’s ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’. I wonder whether, if he were alive today, he might be tempted to go back to the well and write a follow-up, ‘On Financial Disaster Considered as One of the Fine Arts’? The basic material might be less immediately captivating, but there’s a lot to choose from ...”

“... At least I assume this is the case, since we hear enough about it. The book is constructed in the Richard Rogers style, with all the functional background stuff displayed ostentatiously on the outside. There is a Thirlwellesque narrator, a writer who lives in East London, drinks a lot of coffee, and has recently ‘got back into the practice of dope’. He ...”

“... stopped by the British army. They were ordered out onto the road and a gunman with a pronounced English accent demanded that the Catholics among them identify themselves. Fearing now that they’d been stopped by loyalist terrorists, one of the workers, Walter Chapman, whispered to the sole Catholic, Richard Hughes, that ...”

“... of state for communities and local government, tweeted a description of the multimillionaire Richard Desmond as a ‘puppet master’ (Desmond is Jewish), he was not sacked for the antisemitic trope; it was deemed sufficient that he deleted the tweet and apologised when asked to. Meanwhile, it appears that Corbynism’s excitable and often clumsy ...”

“... New Arden English is a specialised, hybrid language – Elizabethan in some features, modern in others, but essentially unlike any English written in any period. That doesn’t disturb most people, including critics who would never dream of quoting Donne or Jonson from modernised texts: but it does mean that only the naive will suppose that the editorial aim is to give us, as nearly as possible, what Shakespeare wrote ...”

“... If Homer had walked the English soil in 1597 he would have felt that he had lived in vain. At that date no English poet had a substantial knowledge of either the Iliad or the Odyssey. Although the statutes of grammar schools made proud boasts that Greek was studied in the higher forms, it’s likely that by the end of the 16th century only a handful of schoolchildren could read more than a few lines of Homer in the original ...”

“... Evesham​ in Worcestershire is one of those agreeable English provincial towns whose modest size preserves its medieval layout. It’s not hard to notice the absence at the heart of the town, a great green open space once occupied by a massive Benedictine abbey. Little of it is left: the remains of two monumental entrance gates plus a lofty detached bell tower, the latter dwarfing the two parish churches that once respectfully flanked an abbey church as large as Worcester or Gloucester Cathedrals ...”