“... the critic John Dennis, John Dyer (the author of the loco-descriptive smash-hit Grongar Hill), Richard Savage, Nahum Tate (the Poet Laureate) and Edward Young (Night Thoughts). For a while, early in his career, Hill acted as secretary to Lord Peterborough, the future honorary Scriblerian; he was also later distantly linked with Bolingbroke, to whom he ...”

“... read. I can still see the mid-1970s Penguin collection I carried around like a talisman: parallel English and French texts, the cover Carlos Schwabe’s painting Spleen et Idéal. OK, I confess: I fell hard for the Baudelaire mythos, while never quite getting the poetry. I remember being put off by all the ‘O, muse!’ stuff, which seemed more redolent of ...”

“... CIA was a Soviet spy. After such sleuthing it is a relief to find in this book of essays edited by Richard Langhorne an article on the Cambridge spies by a don, and it is by far the most sensible account so far written. It is the best because Christopher Andrew is a historian at Corpus Christi, Cambridge who has become the leading authority on the Intelligence ...”

“... useful with Pakistani pilgrims. Ali told me: ‘You’re good at languages. If you could speak English, you could work in a hotel in Mecca.’ His brother spoke English and had a good job in a hotel. Ali told me about English and computer lessons in Pakistan. ‘Go to Karachi. My ...”

“... In the summer​ of 1934, after finishing her English degree at Oxford, Barbara Pym drafted a comic novel. Sending up her closest friends, she cast the arrogant fellow graduate she was in love with as a self-centred cleric, Archdeacon Hoccleve, given to complaining loudly about his wife and numbing his congregation with abstruse sermons ...”

“... New York​ was a great book town in the 1960s. You could buy new books in English at the elegant Scribner shop on Fifth Avenue, new books in French at the Librairie de France or Rizzoli, and old books in German at Mary S. Rosenberg’s austere, packed shop on Broadway, where neither I nor another obsessive friend could afford $100 for a first edition of Winckelmann’s history of ancient art ...”

“... were just jealous. But it’s also possible that the contrast between the views of Russian and English speakers can be put down to the fact that they simply weren’t reading the same novel.*The first English translation of The Brothers Karamazov was by Constance Garnett. It came out in 1912, a good while after the novel ...”

“... Magazine in 1823, soon after the appearance of Thomas de Quincey’s celebrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Hogg delivers what might be called the Scottish verdict on this awesome substance, a substance full of Eastern promise, but also one which, having been invited to the banquet of the senses, stays on too long, becoming both dull and ...”

“... as he was to the antiquities, though not in a way that pleased everyone: as his fellow traveller Richard Chandler wrote in the journals he published a decade after their return to England, ‘several of the Turks murmured, and some threatened, because he overlooked their houses; obliging them to confine or remove the women, to prevent their being seen from ...”

“... the ‘noble’ Christianity of the imperialists from local interpretation. In Bombay, a statue of Richard, marquess of Wellesley, was commissioned in 1806 on his retirement as governor-general. It rapidly became an object of devotion. An exasperated onlooker complained that the ‘Maratha simpletons’ imagined the East India Company had ‘kindly imported an ...”

“... trend’, exemplified by the works of émigré or foreign historians, such as Alexander Yanov and Richard Pipes. He decries the ‘archetypes’ which these authors find in the Russian psyche: a lack of self-worth, intolerance of the opinions of others, and a mixture of spite, envy and worship of external power. Worst of all is the sadomasochistic Russian ...”

“... At the Convent of the Sacred Heart, she studied writing and embroidery, and discovered French and English novels: Ivanhoe, Paul et Virginie, Corinne. In 1870, she married a Louisiana cotton factor, Oscar Chopin, and set out for a grand honeymoon tour of Europe. But the Franco-Prussian War cramped the Chopins’ style; they left Paris as the city was about to ...”

“... King Priam meeting his murderer and calling him a ‘degenerate’, a word I didn’t know in English, let alone in Latin. But I continued construing as far as the Death of Dido. Thirty years before, the late Richard Martineau, D.P. Simpson or Oliver Hunkin would have made sure that every boy in his class understood ...”

“... must not be treated as an official or an authentic text.’ Britain was not then part of the EEC, English yet to become the language of Europe. Article 2: The Community shall have as its task, by setting up a common market and progressively approximating [sic] the economic policies of member states, to promote throughout the Community harmonious development ...”

“... the mist in our minds would get translated into a neat phrase. Better yet, while it works fine in English (‘I know not what’) it had a certain something extra, a je ne sais quoi if you will, if kept in French. Having found a definition for the indefinable it naturally became a topic to be analysed: not the what of what is not known (far too much) but how ...”