“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... As a mystery story, it’s very mysterious. Such is Amis’s authority, already, in modern English fiction that it will be taken very seriously. The Magic Glass is propelled our way by a back-coverful of pre-publication puff: ‘really marvellous’ (Colin Wilson), ‘wickedly funny’ (A.S. Byatt), ‘very nourishing entertainment’ (Dame Rebecca ...”

“... Robinson Crusoe, in 1719. If he had died a year or two earlier, his work would not be on any English literature syllabus. Given that A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain was written even later than his novels, he would probably be entirely unknown to the general reader. He would, however, still be familiar to scholars interested in early ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for being an asthmatic weakling and Nina called him ‘Failurchka’, a synthesis of English and Russian that gives the book its title; that to help Snotty get over his fear of heights, Semyon, with those mighty arms of his, once built his son an indoor ladder, and when Snotty shakily climbed to the top, tried to push him off it; that Nina ...”