“... the work. And she explores this with as much questing and well-furnished unobtrusive cleverness as Richard Sewall brought to his two-volume life of Emily Dickinson – another ‘dotty spinster’, who wrote of her own life: ‘Nothing has happened but loneliness.’ Stevie Smith would not, I think, have said that, though she was much aware of loneliness. Her ...”

“... book his study most brings to mind, in the end, is not another anthropological work but Clockers, Richard Price’s best-selling novel about the Jersey City crack trade. In many ways, indeed, In Search of Respect out-does Clockers. Bourgois did not merely report on East Harlem, after all; he lived there with his wife and child for four years, researching the ...”

“... In his early twenties he published what is probably to this day the most widely read work of English philosophy, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), and followed it with The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940). Late in life he doubted whether much of Language, Truth and Logic was right, and complained that students are required to read it primarily ...”

“... War was to some extent (an extent he characteristically exaggerated) inspired and fashioned by the English captain’s writings. Heinz Guderian and others subsequently proclaimed themselves his disciples. Here was fame indeed, though of an unusual kind. Ideas about the proper use of tanks were not by any means Liddell Hart’s only contribution to the study of ...”

“... Italy. Rowse’s enthusiasms do not cut much ice with Barbara Howard Traister, a professor of English tempted by the New Historicism. She has tried to embrace the whole corpus of Forman’s writings, and says that his manuscripts are more her subject than he is; she wants to pursue through them, not the ‘eccentric and exotic’, by which she feels that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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, ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... painting, were entranced by the Lilliputian artistry of the limners. In his ‘Essay towards an English School of Painting’ (1706), Bainbrigg Buckeridge marvelled how a painting ‘not much bigger than a crown piece’ could contain such lucidity of detail – ‘the heads and beards are so well perform’d that almost each single hair is ...”

“... England, progresses through satirists such as Walter Map (under Henry II) and Chaucer (under Richard II), through the attempts to reanimate classical verse satire in the late Elizabethan period, on (at length) through the 18th century, right up to Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It. Sperrin sees satire as being ‘primarily concerned with regime-level ...”

“... an antique fair. That’s just how we are I’m afraid.’ This is an arch piece of marketing from Richard Osman, promoting his detective novels to an American readership. There’s no reason to suppose that British people are better at hiding in plain sight than anyone else. However, they do like a murder story, and a thriving industry has grown up around ...”