“... generation ago), and under the chairmanship of Charles Palmer, in order to look into the state of English cricket. The Palmer Report was presented in February of last year, and it has, as I have said, been discussed recently at a full Board meeting. Broadly, its recommendations were that County Cricket should continue in its present format of 24 matches, but ...”

“... behalf. Structured in short episodic chunks, Slide focuses on the mid-life melancholy of one Richard Verey, a 35-year-old Englishman. Oxford-educated, old-shoe patrician, Verey is trying to recover pieces of a life that seems to have passed him by, beginning as a student on vacation in Iran. In a village outside Isfahan he buys a set of antique Russian ...”

“... Edward Diestelkamp in giving equal credit for the building’s structure to the ironfounder Richard Turner as to its architect, Decimus Burton. The lives of the building’s inhabitants – plant and human – are glimpsed in short but informative chapters which describe the inception of the idea for such a building, its design, manufacture and ...”

“... short extract will elude the otherwise literate reader (five of them are undefined in the Oxford English Dictionary, and I cannot find even a cognate for the tongue-twisting ‘rhamphorhynchus’). Richard Feynman supposedly turned away requests to explain quantum physics with the jest that if you were smart enough to ...”

“... adolescent readership sit up, As well as exhibiting a tense familiarity with the habits of the English upper-middle class – the village fête, the rectory tea party, ‘the damp beehive in the summer-house’ – they were themselves impeccably well-bred: Joyce, Kafka, Baudelaire, a dash of Conan Doyle. In the late Twenties these were fashionable ...”

“... The Ruin of Kasch is the first part, and The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (which preceded it in English translation) the second. According to the author, the former deals with history, the latter with myth. But whereas The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony was a delightful recreation of the lost art of mythography, The Ruin of Kasch does nothing comparable for ...”

“... Auerbach, Dubuffet and Newman. He tentatively withdraws his estimate of Bomberg as ‘the finest English painter of the century’, and repents some early limiting judgments on Picasso; ‘the young critic cuts his teeth on Picasso. He proves his manhood by putting down Picasso, which is quite easy because he is so flawed an artist, is such a colossal figure ...”

“... of first draft for the home counties’. And Ralph reflects: ‘In my comics everyone except the English stayed where they’d been put.’ The English are a people good at ‘floating by, holding, bleeding dry, but never encountering ... at home nowhere’. And now at last foundering. Beavan’s ship turns into a sort of ...”

“... standard theological works of the time but by an unmatched collection of what we would now call English literature. The most spectacular instance is the only surviving first edition of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, now at the Bodleian Library. ‘Frances wolfreston hor bouk’ is written in italics across the title page. Wolfreston owned twelve ...”

“... Castor does not discuss this part of her career) and then when she ruled England briefly for Richard I as queen mother. This type of queenship can also be glimpsed in Castor’s references to Stephen’s consort, another Matilda, who raised an army to support him after his capture, and was praised by the Gesta Stephani for forgetting a woman’s weakness ...”

“... problem which John Stubbs never grips. We are two-thirds of the way through before we reach ‘the English civil war’ of the 1640s. The bulk of the book is set in the generation before it, from the years around the accession of Charles I to the outbreak of fighting in 1642. ‘Cavalier’ meant more things after 1642 than before it. It was in the mid-winter ...”

“... thus impedes critical political analysis. Not only the Englishman’s constitution but also the English constitution are traditionally felt to be particularly ‘natural’: Shakespeare’s plays are seen as embodying a characteristically English balance of opposites, neither too radical nor too conservative, neither too ...”

“... most cases the effect is playful, but Prince Lluellen is, after all, a dangerous rebel against the English king, while the juxtaposition of Falstaff’s histrionic outlawry with scenes of actual rebellion is a reminder that the mere invocation of Robin Hood could serve as what Barton calls ‘a generalised cover for social protest and dissent’. Indeed her ...”

“... rivers, the Alpheus and the Cladeus, buried the stones in silt. Very little was visible when the English antiquarian Richard Chandler rediscovered the site in 1766; recovery efforts began in the next century. Since the 1870s, the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut has supervised excavation, assisted more recently by the ...”

“... best to do one’s homework by oneself.’ The French on, which is grammatically analogous to the English ‘one’ – sexless and singular – but lacks its pretentious overtones and is commonly used, declines variously and thus more pleasingly. Compare: ‘On fait de son mieux pour faire ses devoirs soi-même.’Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the posthumously ...”