“... presented as the ‘most remarkable’ of the war diaries and even more boldly as ‘unique in the English language’. On the jacket is the boast: ‘Film rights sold to Thames Television’. One of the editors, Suzie Fleming, is described as a feminist, and the publishers were chosen because of a ‘commitment to the experiences of “ordinary” people, 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 ...”

“... and augmenting his haul with additional contributions from snares in the adjacent barley. If one English field needed armaments on that scale, what could be the state of that notoriously rabbit-ridden continent of Australia? Yet in the lists of Britain’s manufacturing exports you never read of Wednesfield’s specialised output, any more than you read of ...”

“... music videos, an effect enhanced by guest appearances from Phil Collins, Willie Nelson, Little Richard, Miles Davis and many others. But the other, complementary theory of the series’ origin names a news story about vice cops using repossessed goods as a glossy cover for their assumed criminal characters. This is why Don Johnson drives a Ferrari and has ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for children.The first episode of Wild Isles begins with footage from a drone swooping in over the English Channel towards the chalk cliffs of Old Harry Rocks in Dorset, both the shot and George Fenton’s orchestral score slyly reminiscent of the opening of The Sound of Music, though the solitary figure who gradually comes into view on the cliff edge is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... property and political influence in the West Country. The poet’s overbearing father, Sir Richard, and his elder brother, Sir Charles, would between them represent Exeter or Devon in Parliament with little interruption between 1743 and 1812. John Bampfylde was educated by private tutors at the family home at Poltimore near Exeter, and later at ...”

“... critic suddenly subservient to a cliché. As important to Hattaway is a vaguely Hillish view of English history. He believes that late Elizabethan drama drew its strength from a social solidarity dissipated under the Stuarts as class distinctions hardened up and the London theatre divided between coterie privacy and a Red Bull populism. As a ...”

“... deadpan account of the tracking and capture of Eichmann in The House on Garibaldi Street; Richard Deacon, The Israeli Secret Service, which tells the story, among others, of Wolfgang Lotz, the Israeli spy with unassailably Aryan looks who infiltrated Egyptian government circles to get plans for rocket sites and the names of German technicians: a story ...”