“... 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 ...”

“... and a new lifestyle to go with it. In Martin’s case, however, this was less Mughal prince than English landed gentleman. He owned estates which stretched across north-eastern India, from Lucknow to Cawnpore, Benares, Chandernagore and Calcutta. And he built himself a sprawling mansion, hopefully named Constantia, on the outskirts of Lucknow, which Jasanoff ...”

“... in wars; the country diaries of curates and Edwardian ladies; prisoners of conscience; Anaïs Nin; Richard Crossman; Tony Benn; Alan Bennett. But on the whole, no. And yet we can’t stop ourselves. These days, if you’re a young writer and you don’t do your own weblog you’re something of an exception, and even for the amateur, the ...”

“... is very different today from what it must have been at the time. In New Bearings in English Poetry, Leavis dismissed Cunard’s Parallax, published in 1925 by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, as ‘simple imitation’ of The Waste Land. This seems wrong as well as unjust. Since Leavis could be wrong and just, and also right and unjust, it is a ...”

“... form around an essential formlessness. Laura Willowes and Timothy Fortune – ‘mute, middle-aged English failures’ – represent, as Harman notes, ‘the most unpromising material’. Where there is no promise to speak of, character can only ever form by acquiescence. Laura Willowes and Timothy Fortune are memorable because they acquiesce with such passion ...”

“... security. He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in’: thus Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, 1968. It is not often that a book casts fresh light on American history throughout this century, but this biography of Edgar Hoover does just that. Not only was Hoover, as head of the FBI, America’s leading policeman: he enjoyed an extraordinary ...”

“... notable athlete, who had returned to Eton as an assistant-master. Hart-Davis was up to him for ‘English Extra Studies’, and they had remained friends. Lyttelton’s reputation for teaching English in an inspiring manner is in some degree supported by the subsequent careers of pupils, who included Aldous ...”

“... London booksellers who, sometimes in collaboration, were publishing most of the best writers in English, from poets to physicians. By the 1790s, he was one of six London booksellers each of whom was publishing, either at his sole risk or as a member of an ad hoc syndicate or ‘conger’, an average of more than a hundred titles a year, whether new works or ...”

“... strict about only talking French to each other, believing that if they were caught chatting in English they would be sent home, but lax about other things. The comtesse didn’t enforce the 12.15 a.m. curfew or stop Bouvier from having male visitors (other families wouldn’t let a suitor through the door), and there was freedom in being reachable only by ...”

“... own surviving letters. Sterne was hardly the first vain author, but he was perhaps the first major English writer who declined to play the old games of gentlemanly reticence or high-minded modesty. At last, we see an author who does not pretend to be above the market, who unreservedly enjoys popularity. At last, someone who does not regret that all sorts of ...”

“... the cable was a joke of some sort. It might just as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial. It took me about two days to ascertain from various friends in New York and Paris that it was indeed genuine, and far less time than that ...”