“... 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 ...”

“... Do you speak Whiggish? The most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary does not, it appears – at least not fluently. The original OED, compiled in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contained full entries for ‘Whig’ and its adjectival derivatives, denoting that group or tradition which had been one of the two main contending forces in British political life from the late 17th to at least the mid 19th century ...”

“... Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and Melvin Bradford. Liberals thus find themselves confronting a shrewd scholar who denies them the luxury of easy retort – he lashes out from both right and left to rough up the bourgeois middle. What can one do with a once-loyal Marxist who ...”

“... both national and televisual – that made them possible. To accept (and extend to Celtic Britain) Richard Hoggart’s assertion, in The Way We Live Now, that the English are ‘most characteristic of their collective selves when being irreverent, vulgar, nutty rather than when brought together in deference or respect for ...”

“... on Poirot’s part, since he is a Belgian refugee who consistently speaks a foreigner’s stage English, and moreover is so linguistically uncertain that he has occasional difficulty with phrases imported from his own native French. But of course what Poirot spots is true, and, if we have not remarked the fact as we read, it is for a reason taking us ...”

“... himself disciplining those members of his flock who were influenced by Tom Paine or by the prophet Richard Brothers (‘God’s nephew’). He published one tract entitled The Moral Law not Injured by the Everlasting Gospel. That might seem to take us closer to Blake but in fact it does not, since if Blake had written such a tract its title would have been ...”

“... The Book of Blam, The Use of Man and Kapo – in the 1970s, and all three are now available in English (superbly translated by Michael Henry Heim, Bernard Johnson and Richard Williams). In their determination that the very worst be said, they are grim but not depressing – exhilarating, even. Each novel is quite ...”

“... of the earliest letters, written when Gabriel was seven, records his ‘reading Shakespeare’s Richard the 3rd for my amusement . . . I, Maria, and William know several scenes by heart. I have bought a picture of Richard and Richmond fighting, and I gilded it after which I cut it out with no white.’ This self-assured ...”

“... the danger that voter ID is supposed to head off, it deals in hearsay and rumour. It names sixteen English electoral fraud hotspots, but doesn’t say, as at least one newspaper (the Times) reported it did, that these are places where electoral fraud has been shown to take place. It says they’re places where people are more likely to say they think it’s ...”

“... others; final illness and death. The chief woman in Crane’s life, Cora Taylor, belongs to the English period too. But it all hinges on Linson’s daybed. The daybed was along a windowless wall covered with drawings, prints, oil sketches and a wooden artist’s palette. The room was full of late Victorian clutter: an end table holding a large kerosene ...”

“... epiphanies expressing disintegration, the hero goes to pieces. In Venice he reads Pascal in an English edition that’s lying around, and especially, it seems, the sub-section ‘Le Divertissement’ in the ‘Misère de l’Homme’ section of the Pensées, where Pascal persuasively claims to have discovered ‘that all the unhappiness of men comes from ...”

“... in Paul Auster’s bilingual The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry (1982), where the English-language version is by Samuel Beckett. ‘Zone’ begins, like ‘Prufrock’, by signalling a determination to move beyond 19th-century diction and imagery – ‘A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien,’ rendered by Beckett as ‘In the end you are ...”