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“... 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 ...”

“... and brothers’. Most were written by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the ...”

“... and the university; about lying in the long grass at the edge of the playground with his friends Richard and Roger, ‘trying to fart at will’; about avoiding Julie, ‘who liked to pounce on innocent-looking kids and ask them the Question – “D’you know what having it off means?”’; about the time Francis ‘crept onto the landing and kissed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he shared, incidentally, with members of the Viennese Jockey Club), his remarkable command of English, and his consistently affectionate and trustful relationship with Ernest Jones (the Welshman who went about in a sort of honorary yarmoulka), as well as his conventional dislike of America, are dealt with at great length. The story of Freud’s friendship ...”

“... on. I take the ‘I’ as referring, truthfully, to Gillian Clarke and issuing as directly as the English language allows from her apportioned experience. So it makes a difference if belief is strained or affronted, if I lose confidence in the validity of what she says. It is a mark of Gillian Clarke’s poetry that she prefers to perceive things rather than ...”

“... Serge’s widow, Laurette Séjourné, insisted that no unpublished material existed. I asked Richard Greeman, his principal translator and founder of the Victor Serge Foundation, what the story was. Séjourné, he explained,had them in her possession but kept them hidden. She denied this to me, to Susan Weissman and even to Serge’s ...”

“... who’ve been programmed to adopt a style of play based on the long-ball game prevalent in the English leagues about ten years ago. That’s why great players like Lampard and Gerrard suddenly look like they’ve been drafted in from Howard Wilkinson’s Sheffield Wednesday. And the accompanying thought: where are the real England team? Who’s keeping ...”

“... the troubled history of hermeneutics, and some that return to an old worry of Hartman’s, the English critical style as he sees it – smooth, conversational, exhibiting a lack of original thought and self-reflection: ‘a civil art’, when Hartman feels admiring, ‘a civil jargon’ when he doesn’t. He can be stern on the subject; tea and totality ...”

“... So what are they interested in? Although Mrs Thatcher is an unabashed British (many would say English) nationalist, her political supremacy has not been accompanied by a new wave of patriotic histories stressing what was distinctive, cohesive and glorious about Great Britain’s past. Instead, historians from all parts of the political spectrum have ...”

“... wide philosophical interest. In clarifying the distinction between the selfish gene hypothesis of Richard Dawkins and the selfish DNA hypothesis of Francis Crick, he is led into an enlightening discussion of biological reductionism. The Darwinism of Dawkins is thoroughly reductionist, in the sense that bodies are merely temporary containers for their selfish ...”

“... Hamlet first broke out into soliloquy, but when he first broke into sarcastic black comedy. In English the dialogue, near the end of I.ii, runs thus: Horatio My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral. Hamlet I prithee do not mock me, fellow-student; I think it was to see my mother’s wedding. Horatio Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon. Hamlet ...”

“... David Ellis and Mark Kinkead-Weekes ones) looming up awesomely over the first crest: but Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce was a very long book indeed, and it gripped one from start to finish. I think the answer may be, partly, that a biography simply has to have a narrative, and a non-prescriptive approach tends to sap the narrative. What will ...”