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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... unconditional submission – and your money’. Nor was the satire he directed at the English class system and religion, especially the established Church, or at contemporary attitudes to women’s rights, universally welcomed. Still, readers appreciated his evident benevolence, allied to a humour that recalled Fielding, Smollett and Sterne. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the international and back. At one moment he immerses us in a Northern (or Midlands in my case) English worry about what happens to us socially when we drop our ‘h’s and pronounce our ‘u’s as in ‘wuss’ rather than as in (the Southern form of) ‘lustre’, the next he is wondering how to memorialise the dead of Hiroshima or the Gulf War. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Fisher, who give the lie to that. Home is no longer ‘so sad’. At home few people speak Proper English all the time. Home-based poetry may be in dialect, which is present in nearly all the writers considered here: but it may also fuel itself with a hyper-articulate, decorous Queen’s English that deliberately celebrates ...”

“... English-language philosophy of science is still dominated by ideas brought to it by refugees. In the first wave, England got the Austrians, including Karl Popper and Otto Neurath (not to mention Wittgenstein), and later got Paul Feyerabend from Vienna and Imre Lakatos from Budapest. The United States got the Germans, including Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach ...”

“... literature is now felt to be under threat. His bland intention is ‘to set forth the outlines of English history so that they may serve as background for the study of English literature’. He denies that the task is impossible, though such a work can hardly equip the reader with what he will feel he needs to know about ...”

“... The English are not at their best, although they may well be at their most characteristic, when they go on a lot about the dear old days at school or the ’varsity. Not even the inspired Cyril Connolly could get his tongue far enough into his cheek to be anything more tolerable than stomach-turning about Eton. George Orwell, who had been there too but thought it was possible to have a life afterwards, was surely right to tell him to come off it ...”

“... than the old vernacular, much of the traditional Scottish poetic inheritance was pushed aside. English English came naturally to Boswell, less naturally but effectively in the sentences of Adam Smith and David Hume, but at the cost of the reservation of the Scottish tongue for casual, domestic or low-life use. Yet, as Daiches reminds us, with an ...”

“... who started moving in their own directions after the Sex Pistols showed the way. Debbie Juvenile, Richard Hell, Howard Devoto, Poly Styrene, Stiv Bator, Lucy Toothpaste, Mark P, Joe Strummer, Steve Severin, Siouxsie Sioux, Tom Verlaine, Jordan, Sue Catwoman, Berlin: names to conjure with. And names which hang round the neck of stories less mythical perhaps ...”

“... and also the blandest of experts at suggesting but never revealing his own private life, the English writer Edmund Gosse enthused on the resemblance of the aged Walt Whitman to ‘a great old Angora Tom’. The marvellous old poet, with his soft white hair and snowy silken ruff of beard, would have been delighted by the compliment. Philip Callow’s book ...”

“... letters in which he rehearses his political uncertainties and his bungled love affair with another English tourist, Mary Trevellyn, whom he chases in vain across Europe. Claude’s own name, as Adam Phillips has observed, suggests ‘someone being got at’, and early on he rejoices thatIt is a blessing, no doubt, to be rid, at least for a time, ofAll one’s ...”