“... have included: ‘Why did Nelson and Wellington become national heroes?’; ‘What liberties did English people enjoy by the end of the 17th century that they hadn’t had at the start?’; and ‘How dangerous was the Spanish Armada?’ – the examinee, it’s presumed, isn’t going to answer from the point of view of the Spanish. Schama has rejected the ...”

“... Once convicted, the greatest forgers of English literary documents have stayed convicted. In two famous cases, those of the 17-year-old Thomas Chatterton, who fabricated poems he attributed to a mythical 15th-century Bristol monk, and the equally immature William Henry Ireland, who forged manuscripts by Shakespeare before which Boswell knelt in adoration, apologists have found a degree of extenuation in claiming that theirs were the follies of ambitious but misguided youth ...”

“... often produced better results than violence against them. When force worked, no one – not the English, the French or the Spanish – was reluctant to use it, as Timucuans, Pequots, Wampanoags and Natchez could all have testified. Thousands of these peoples not only died: they often died cruelly and gruesomely. North America in the 16th, 17th and 18th ...”

“... Game is also a translation, but from the 15th not the 21st century. It is Edward, Duke of York’s English rendering of the most famous of the many hunting treatises of the Middle Ages, the Livre de chasse of Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix (d. 1391). Edward omitted some of Gaston’s chapters (on the ibex, for instance, and the reindeer, not very relevant ...”

“... but at the same time indefinable category of writer who can in some way be thought of as ‘English’, in inverted commas. The concept would only apply in the twilight of Empire, between 1900 and 1950, a mere fifty years of elusive but positive literary ‘Englishness’. Four possible candidates, varying in attainments, would be T.E. Lawrence, Robert ...”

“... a patina of middle-classness, his beginning wasn’t much grander than my own. He and his brother Richard had been brought up in a similarly boxy little house in a similarly depressing part of Haywards Heath by his single teacher mother. Although his family was much better educated than mine, it was still trapped in the same sort of grim lower echelons of the ...”

“... Thomas Pynchon, American of no known address, is possibly the most accomplished writer of prose in English since James Joyce. This is not to say that he is also the best novelist, whatever that would mean, but that sentence by sentence he can do more than any novelist of this century with the resources of the ...”

“... and trash’, or in another poem the ‘Corona and potato crisps’, upon the hateful English; and Thomas, though he has no special tenderness for the English, has consistently refused that easy way out – for him, the mindlessness of many Welshmen is not to be explained away by talk of colonialism. Perhaps ...”

“... in London is enough to vanquish and dissipate the phlegmatic composure of the Russianist lecturer Richard Vaisey. As we come to know old Vaisey we can only guess at how his phleg. comp. has held up so long, what with his terrifying spouse Cordelia and all. Cordelia, though rendered in an aspect of nastiness which entirely lacks chiaroscuro, turns out all the ...”

“... to the last chapter, which begins with the blunt announcement that ‘he is one of the greatest of English prose stylists in the 19th century, his Apologia and Idea of a University appearing in university literature syllabuses in the 20th.’ Apparently not recognising the crashing non-sequitur, Martin goes on to devote more space to Newman’s novel, Loss and ...”

“... To the increasingly disillusioned popular mind, it appeared that the most respected classes of English society were coming apart at the moral seams. This impression was deepened by the numerous cases that symptomatised the loosened sexual mores adopted by certain segments of society. White-collar felonies were supplemented by what might be called ...”

“... Britain and France. In fact there was plenty of evidence to show that wealthier members of the English middle class imitated aristocratic values by purchasing country estates, while Germany’s introduction of parliamentary assemblies and organised political parties in the middle decades of the 19th century fundamentally changed its political systems. In ...”

“... In April​ 1486, eight months after Richard III’s death at the Battle of Bosworth, the ‘Lancastrian’ Henry VII set out with all the usual pomp and pageantry on a progress through his new kingdom. Before visiting York, Richard’s northern stronghold, Henry sent instructions ahead telling the citizens how he was to be received ...”

“... Shakespeare wrote under Queen Elizabeth. The greater part of the book explores the plays about English history: the six King Henry plays and two King Richard plays, which relate the origins and course of the Wars of the Roses, and King John. But there are also extensive discussions of the contemporary political ...”

“... as if it were served up on a plate like John the Baptist’s.A portrait of Katherine’s nephew Richard Sackville may have been intended to mark the lavish festivities, in February 1613, for the marriage of James I’s daughter Princess Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. Richard – a notorious spendthrift ...”