“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... history; about Blake, Ruskin, Faraday, Milton, Constable and Purcell. William Empson, who studied English with him at Cambridge in the late 1920s, and with whom he started the magazine Experiment, thought of Jennings as ‘quite unaffectedly a leader’ who ‘was rather unconscious of other people, except as an audience’. Another Cambridge ...”

“... in this period, in part because of acquisitions made during trade missions by the Dutch and English East India Companies, the English Levant Company and the Chamber of Commerce of Marseille, but also because of the active involvement of powerful individuals. Louis XIV’s famous minister of finances, Jean-Baptiste ...”

“... scams are expected to cost the world $27 trillion a year; roughly a third of the planet – any English or Chinese speaker with a phone number or email address – is a potential victim. In the UK, a financial scam is committed every fifteen seconds. Cocaine cartels shift a product that must be painstakingly grown and chemically processed, then transported ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her how to e-mail and fax, how to pull things off the Internet. Jo, a country girl with poor English who’d never seen a modern office, was thrilled, couldn’t wait each day to go to work – and gradually she became useful, a real help. She didn’t want to go back to school – she was scared the rapists would kill her. It was impossible to have much ...”

“... 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 ...”