“... However​ dissentious, alienating, confusing and anxious life may have been for most of the English under the Tudors, the period, especially its last two decades, has usually been remembered as an idyllic apogee of national self-definition. By the time Shakespeare and his apprentice John Fletcher co-wrote All Is True (printed as Henry VIII) in 1613, wistfulness for the previous reign was already growing, despite what the playwrights and others may have recalled about Tudor rule: agricultural depression, enclosure, the plague, the poor law and the Essex Rebellion ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... claim was by lineal descent from Edward III, and was a strong one if you ignored the deposition of Richard II in 1399. In the mid-1450s, Richard, Duke of York, Edward’s father and England’s pushiest peer, had twice attempted to sideline Henry VI, who suffered from lengthy spells of mental illness and was repelled by the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sociologist-philosopher Jean Baudrillard in America, the latest of his works translated into English. At first the reader might wonder why a prose as dense as his should be made more so by having it stretched across pages of a width and gloss more appropriate to an otherwise agreeably produced and illustrated coffee-table book. But if not actually ...”

“... as exemplar’. After he died in December 1918, Cecil’s proto-fascist ideology, a combination of English nationalism, guild socialism, racism and conspiracy theory, continued to be propagated in the Catholic Distributism preached by his widow, Ada, G.K. and their ally Hilaire Belloc.For Belloc, ‘the Jewish nation intermixed with other nations alien to it ...”

“... 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 ...”