“... Maeterlinck. Initially, neither party seems to have been troubled that Maeterlinck spoke no English, and the great Belgian set to work on a screen version of his novel La Vie des Abeilles. When the script was translated Goldwyn read it with increasing consternation until he could no longer deny the evidence of his senses. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The ...”

“... Poel in the 1890s, emerged as part of an Arts and Crafts yearning for a pre-industrial, hyper-English England. The earliest attempt to build a conjectural replica of the Globe – a half-size version by Edwin Lutyens – formed part of the nostalgic Shakespeare’s England exhibition mounted at Earl’s Court in 1912.In the US such fairground ...”

“... have come to light (again) in Montreal: a small team from the Toronto-based Records of Early English Drama project even produce an elaborate and implausible hypothesis in defence of the suspect cloth label on the back. The wish that was father to that thought is made helpfully explicit by the artistic director of the Stratford Festival in Ontario, ...”

“... has been the dark period of the Church of England: the middle ground lost between books on the English Revolution and the Elizabethan Church on the one side, and studies of religion in the English Revolution on the other. Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne are subjects: literature has seen to that. And so is ...”

“... France displayed a more radical profile than Tory England, and a polity more attractive to the English liberal Whig than Catholic, Inquisitorial Spain and Portugal. Decidedly a liberal Whig, Byron abstains pointedly from cheering on the war effort. He denounces our Portuguese allies as cowardly and murderous, and sees the Spanish resistance as compromised ...”

“... It employed no reporters – news items were prepared from Reuter’s agency copy – until Richard Dimbleby, a reporter on Southampton’s evening newspaper, applied for a job with a bold letter suggesting that some members of the news staff might be called ‘BBC reporters or BBC correspondents’ and ‘held in readiness, just as are the evening ...”

“... were young and anything but discreet, sober or, for the most part, fluent in languages other than English. Many came from America’s upper echelons: Mellon, Vanderbilt, du Pont, Morgan and other robber baron families. Some, to the dismay of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, were trade unionists, socialists, Jews and veterans of the Lincoln Brigade. When Hoover ...”

“... was to find out why, in an era of melting ice, rising seas and swollen rivers, this low-lying English district, a reclaimed wetland with barely a free plot above the high-water mark on a spring tide, was still building out. Surely the barrier had been built to protect lives and existing property unluckily stranded in a climate change danger zone, not to ...”

“... parts of Henry VI, which we are now invited to refer to as The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York – 1 Henry VI comes later, after Titus Andronicus. The two parts of Henry IV are similarly split by The Merry Wives, which shows how fiercely attentive to chronology we are required to be. For simplicity’s sake, the following remarks on ...”

“... an interpretation rather than a given. (The best description of this theme in modern thought is Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.) Derrida, in criticising ‘presence’ and ‘Western Metaphysics’, is, along with Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sellars and Quine, criticising the ‘myth of the given’ – the myth that knowledge can be ...”

“... In February 1948 André Gide received an uncharacteristically triumphant letter from his English translator. Used to hearing about Gide’s exploits, she now had, girlishly, ‘a little adventure of my own’ to confess. The manuscript of a short story which she had written and sent to Gide 19 years earlier – ‘Oh how could I be so idiotic?’ – and which Gide had stuffed in his desk drawer, had at last been shown to friends in London ...”

“... It started the moment Kant put down his pen, but for those more comfortable with plain writing in English, it began perhaps with William James deriding the ‘copy theory of truth’. This path has been increasingly followed of late; its most widely-read exposition is Richard Rorty’s pragmatism. The will to truth ...”

“... broker for imperial trophies (Cyprus, a trunkful of Suez Canal shares) and the transformer of English queens into empresses of India. Peel, reincarnated as William Gladstone, denounces him from beyond the grave. Gladstone sweeps to victory, Byron is toppled and Peel is avenged. Byron dies, leaving posterity perplexed. Had he been a writer who happened to ...”

“... of silks, spices and porcelain carried back overland to Russia and on the ships of Dutch and English trading monopolies. China tea, in china teapots, poured into china cups: this is still a scene of ‘blue willow’ domesticity whose original Oriental exoticism has been effectively erased from collective memory. Coffee, and the culture of the ...”

“... If its precise meaning is hard to catch, there is no doubt that it has one. St Mary’s is an English parish church, complete with altar, lectern and richly coloured stained glass, but the marble altar with its eagle supporters has a pagan look, a lectern, carved out of bog oak, takes the form of a stork arching upwards and seeming to writhe out of the ...”