“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wonders how such land-bound creatures as the Spaniards managed to get to America at all. Did Sir Richard Hawkins say his latitude was 48°, three degrees north of where he ought to have been? Then he meant 50° 48' – ‘how so obvious an error got into the text is immaterial.’ He saw a peopled country with many fires? That could easily be the uninhabited ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... tongues, we are too mesmerised to be sceptical, although, in his brief and sensible treatise on English prose style, Herbert Read very pertinently enquired if anyone had actually seen those ‘tongues’. They were lying tongues no doubt, however dumb. But Kipling knew how eloquent they would be, and brazenly classed them with the good journalist’s ...”

“... family to include a startling and unlikely candidate: a translation of a mystical meditation into English from French made by Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen. The Glass of the Sinful Soul, as she called it, was not an original work, but a good pupil’s exercise, undertaken in 1544 at the age of 11 as part of her lessons. A long prayer by Marguerite de ...”

“... jollity was Charles Hamilton, better known as Frank Richards, who made a Never Never Land of the English public school, but did it with such dash, amiability and authority that every subsequent generation, right up to the present, has contained its quota of Greyfriars enthusiasts. Greyfriars came into being in 1908 along with Harmsworth’s Magnet, its ...”

“... this. The opium trade, they believed, demeaned and disgraced the whole enterprise. The Radical Richard Cobden thought it showed the British up as ‘bullies’ and ‘cowards’. The imperialist Lord Elgin claimed it revealed ‘how hollow and superficial’ were ‘both their civilisation and their Christianity’. Gladstone thought it ‘covered this ...”

“... Empson frequented and admired in Cambridge – he translated two short books by Haldane into Basic English. However, it is here shown also that some earlier Empsons were intellectuals as well as peremptory squires. Brains as well as plain speaking were respected in the family. The poet himself set great store by purity of intellect, which enables one to say ...”

“... climate. Imports and translations have increased greatly in number in the past ten years, with English and German vying for first place in the translation table, French running third. But there is an imbalance in the relationship. ‘The complaint of Hungarian literature is that it is undervalued on the world stage. We could have a greater presence in the ...”