“... to wobble somewhat as to the chops.)’ To this and other tips and observations the long-suffering Richard Ryder replied, poker-penned: ‘The contents of your correspondence have been carefully noted,’ and – doubts obviously stirring – returned Henry’s usual enclosure of £1 ‘with best wishes as always’. The Further Letters of Henry Root, in other ...”

“... of the right and proper use of character stereotypes, and of Mayhem Parva, her own special English village fantasy with its definitions of the middle class under pressure. While not caring for some of her attitudes, he seems right to respect ‘the typically Christiean lack of compassion’. Uncondescending and highly perceptive, it’s the first book ...”

“... on which the artist feasted for a fortnight. Spencer’s enthusiasm for garbage is not unique in English art. According to Ruskin, Turner ‘not only could endure, but enjoyed and looked for litter, like Covent Garden wreck after the market’. His pictures are ‘often full of it, from side to side’ and he ‘delights in shingle, débris, and heaps of ...”

“... in 1764. Woodcut illustrations, scanty before the 19th century, can be found as early as 1681 in Richard Burton’s Historical Remarques. The great age of the London guidebook began, however, in the middle of the 19th century, as David Webb has shown in the London Journal (1980, No 2). One important development illustrates nicely that odd relationship ...”

“... siuzhet,’ Belknap continues, ‘is more Rabelaisian: the first ten words in the English translation produce an expectation of prating piety. The last two words frustrate that expectation.’ That’s putting it mildly. One could write another short book about the literary effects hiding in the word ‘frustrate’. Belknap puts in a good ...”

“... the seventh magic bullet and literally all Hell breaks loose. The playbill for a production at the English Opera House makes no mention of the music, which must have been inaudible, promising instead a ‘Storm and Hurricane’ during which ‘the Daemon of the Hartz Mountains appears, the Rattle of Wheels and the Tramp of Horses are Heard.’ The mounting ...”

“... of Iraqis being killed for not fighting, and their grimy pictures of themselves, as lost as the English-speaking soldiers they have been living with. Al-Jazeera has had reporters inside Mosul, Baghdad, Basra and Nasiriya, one of them the irrepressible Tasir Alouni, fluent veteran of the Afghanistan war, and they have presented a much more detailed, more ...”

“... such negativity had all but drained away. ‘A new generation of Dadaists has emerged today,’ Richard Hamilton wrote in 1961, ‘but son of Dada is accepted.’ With Jeff Koons, the current maestro of the readymade, whose work is the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney in New York (until 19 October), acceptance has become affirmation, even ...”

“... of Francis Spufford’s engaging new book calls them, meaning above all Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins – believe in spite of all evidence that eventually the religious will see sense. And yet with their magical belief in the truth of science – their taking for granted a consensus about the value of scientific evidence – and their unspoken ...”

“... feelingfully about the perils of too much Eng. Lit. He ‘emerged from the experience of reading English at Cambridge’, he explains in the introduction, ‘imbued with a thriving, unshakeable contempt for anyone who had had the temerity to attempt the writing of literature in the last seventy or eighty years’. For a while he made one ...”

“... millennials: Baume christened Frankie after the precocious underachiever in Franny and Zooey, an English major who’s ‘sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody’. Her epigraph – ‘the worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly’ – is borrowed from another Salinger ...”

“... shyness meant she would always hate it, that both her parents were academics (Ellmann’s father, Richard, was Joyce’s biographer, her mother, Mary, a celebrated Tennyson scholar). The unspooling of all of this is intercut with shorter sections, written in full sentences, describing the journey of a cougar that sets out across Ohio to find her stolen ...”

“... brought classical education under pressure from science, as well as from subjects such as English literature, which was beginning to construct its own canon and articulate its claims to represent the best of vernacular, national culture. Even at Oxford and Cambridge, the arrival of new notions of discipline and method (often imported from Germany with ...”

“... and the ‘trashy’. Classy Europeans are gorgeous and erudite; they invariably speak fluent English. Trashy Europeans are funny foreigners, and make the sorts of mistakes an anglophone does when trying to imitate a funny foreigner. The classiest of them all is Greta’s lover, Flavia, whom Greta calls ‘Big Swiss’ because she’s tall and from ...”