“... 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 ...”

“... de Monku’ – a bilingual pun. As well as being the Japanese pronunciation of the English word ‘monk’, monku means ‘complaint’. ‘We think it will take a long time to get back to a calm, quiet, ordinary life,’ the flyer said. ‘Why don’t you come and join us – take a break and have a little moan? The monks will listen to your ...”

“... science. To an alarming degree, theory preempted argument. H.D. had been abandoned by her husband, Richard Aldington, for another woman, during a difficult pregnancy in which mother and child seemed doomed; her love affair with the feminist Bryher was fraught; writing set up its own strains: but Freud already knew, amid this welter of anxieties, what really ...”

“... that his daughter Sara had followed him into hypochondria and drug addiction. As Rosemary Ashton, Richard Holmes and Morton Paley remind us, Coleridge did survive the long years of estrangement, both from Wordsworth and from all he had ceded to Wordsworth; he did begin to return to himself. When the current of critical opinion reversed, he found himself the ...”

“... that frightfully dreary thing in the East End?’ At the end of Carousel at the National Theatre, Richard Eyre escorts her to the door: ‘I’m glad you enjoyed the show.’ ‘I didn’t, I can’t bear the piece.’She was just as rude and inconsiderate in private, late to arrive and even later to leave which meant that nobody else could leave ...”

“... and popularity) for a translation of Homer. This was probably the best deal ever struck by an English poet. The fee for the copyright combined with income from the sale of subscription copies of the Iliad made Pope around £5000. That was an eye-watering sum. The contract for Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1667 paid him two instalments of £5 and may have ...”

“... of the youthful Percy Wyndham Lewis, a writer whose work had appeared in Ford’s magazine, the English Review, and who was about to launch a magazine of his own, the rather more intemperate Blast. Gripping Ford by the elbow, Lewis, who was as usual in incendiary mood, poured scorn on him and his associates. ‘You and Mr Conrad and Mr James and all those ...”