“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Lewis finally met in 1926 and duly formed a club called the Cave for members of the Oxford English School who like them wanted to introduce more Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature, and more philology, to the undergraduate syllabus. (Tolkien argued that the syllabus should stop at 1400. Omission of Shakespeare would be unfortunate, but necessary to ...”

“... If​ his English teacher hadn’t been so snootily discouraging, it’s unlikely that Tony Harrison would have gone on to write as much as he has: by my calculation, 13 plays, 11 films and twenty or more poetry collections and pamphlets, not to mention the essays and addresses assembled in Edith Hall’s edition of his selected prose ...”

“... word ‘radical’, that heady presence in the 1960s and beyond. Subtitled ‘Radical Ideas in the English Revolution’, his book explored the ‘fascinating flood of radical ideas’ that emerged from the ‘radical underground’. The Levellers were ‘a very radical left wing of the revolutionary party’, he wrote, though since their thinking stayed ...”

“... Two decades ago​ , the historian Blair Worden praised a feat of deception ‘without parallel in English literature’. The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow were first published posthumously in 1698-99, and edited in two volumes in 1894 by Charles Firth, later the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. For centuries, the Memoirs were one of the best-known sources on the civil wars ...”

“... trip. No car touring or sightseeing or cool drinks on the terrace. His is also a thoroughly English book, though: good-humoured where Theroux would be sour, blithely confident and optimistic where a Naipaul would be tensely aware of his statelessness. Even the occasional xenophobic aside, as when Dalrymple assesses some ‘piratical-looking ...”

“... this position during the period with which we are concerned.’ Thus, the introduction of Sir Richard Southern’s Making of the Middle Ages. Bartlett quoted it in a perceptive recent tribute to Southern, with the rider that ‘every century has its protagonists,’ but ‘those who see the 11th and 12th centuries as a time of particularly significant ...”

“... to How to Become a Musical Critic. Some of the alterations are minimal: ‘British’ becomes ‘English’; the ‘latest’ edition of Grove is now a ‘recent’ edition, and so on. Other changes seem to display a shift in Mr Laurence’s romantic emphases: Greer Garson arrives; Leonard Bernstein departs. More interesting is the partial reversal of Mr ...”

“... detailed study of John Cleland, author of one of the most salacious pieces of fiction in the English language; but it is no disrespect to Hal Gladfelder to wonder whether the Johns Hopkins press would have been quite so eager to take on an erudite study of an obscure 18th-century hack were he not renowned for having written an exceedingly dirty ...”

“... cause.’ The SNP gloried, then as now, in the possibility of a Scotland out of step with English opinion; the substantive issues were matters of relative indifference. Theresa May’s political ally, Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, maintained a consistently negative policy towards European integration between the two ...”

“... conversant with Marx and Weber, polyglot and multilingual (but always with strongly accented English), veterans of complicated doctrinal wars in the sectarian world of European socialism, these rumpled figures, whom it was impossible to imagine had ever been young, provoked awed attention in some students and light-hearted mockery in others. For those ...”

“... Baynes (extravagantly described by Maddox as ‘a return to endogamy’, ‘the choice of a deeply English woman, rather than a foreigner, as a love object’); above all, the mass of newly discovered letters in the Cambridge edition, and the unfinished novel Mr Noon, available only since 1984, which gives a quasi-autobiographical account of the early days of ...”

“... out of Soviet literature since the Twenties. It is pleasingly coincidental that its appearance in English should coincide with the first appearance in the Soviet Union of Nabokov’s works, for it is, both in tone and manner, undeniably Nabokovian. Where Rybakov deals with a group, Bitov probes an individual; where Rybakov employs a wide, panoramic sweep and ...”