“... 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 ...”

“... at its purest and broadest is simply an intact version of late 18th and early 19th-century London English. Who knows? I don’t want to overdetermine to the point of absurdity, but it seems fairly obvious that what Clive James represents is a kind of stylised distortion of what Britain sees itself as: a kind of self-possessed jokey coarseness, very smart and ...”

“... The origin of War of the Worlds is Wells’s conviction that a superior race would treat the English as the English had recently treated the luckless Tasmanians. ‘Are we such apostles of mercy,’ his narrator asks, ‘to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?’ Bogdanov’s Martians are interplanetary ...”

“... be forgotten today. If he had died at 35, like Mozart, he would be recalled in specialist books on English music as a minor figure. Of all the great composers, he was among the latest to develop, and he never ceased to resent this. Then, in 1898, at the age of 41, he wrote the Enigma Variations, a heartfelt tribute to those friends who formed a cross-section ...”

“... impressive. As a result, in no other literature is the writer so much a performing self, as Richard Poirier has observed, and in no other literature is such a premium placed on raw data and its virtuoso delivery. The American interest in ‘fact’ derives from the same complex of attitudes. One can see it not only in the regularly contemptuous ...”

“... He is an Australian scholar who began his acquaintance with India twenty years ago as a teacher of English at Chandigarh. He ‘relies heavily’ on Indian newspapers and periodicals, about whose proliferation in the Punjab, in the vernacular as well as in English, he has much to say; his own work might be called an essay in ...”

“... power in the world. But Tangier was too far from home for the overstretched resources of the English Crown to maintain for long, no matter how much money was poured into it. By 1680, Moroccan armies had seized three of the colony’s five forts. Four years later, it was abandoned, destroyed by the same people who had built it. The coins they left behind ...”

“... What is history for? What do we want it to do? In 1731, an obscure Kentish schoolmaster named Richard Spencer offered some answers. Properly to ascertain his position in geographical space, he reasoned, required not a single map, but access to a global atlas, one that would allow him to ‘see what London and the adjacent parts are in the kingdom; what the kingdom is in Europe, and what Europe is in the universe ...”

“... When Richard Rorty died last year, the New York Times called him ‘one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers’. Few philosophers would accept this assessment. Rorty was widely read and admired by many, he had a good nose for a controversy and was impressive in oral debate. But his influence on philosophy has, so far, been minimal: Rorty’s unconvincing attempts to show that traditional philosophy has had its day have largely been ignored by philosophers ...”

“... and pendulums by celestial law and geometrical order. However surprising it may seem, even the English title, ‘The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’, was, according to Newton, designed to help the book sell. Long before scientific popularisation became the common salvation of hard-pressed publishers, Newtonianism spawned a strenuous ...”

“... for state uniformity – still appears to influence Labour Party policy. Their tortuous history of English local government, published in 1906, is full of complaints about local autonomy. ‘It does not seem to have occurred to the framers or supporters of the Municipal Corporation Act of 1835,’ they wrote, ‘to make the slightest beginning of any ...”