“... in some ways rather proper, had a taste for the risqué: his literary adviser in the early days, Richard Le Gallienne, poetaster, philanderer and drinker, had an instinct for the mood of the times. The Bodley Head rapidly became a succès de scandale as well as modestly profitable for some years. Aubrey Beardsley and Charles Ricketts were among the ...”

“... is. And how far from being resolved, or even fully articulated. Henry Louis Gates, professor of English and chairman of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, has been one of the most articulate commentators on the subject. His first scholarly interest was the recovery and editing of ‘lost’ and ignored texts, primarily slave narratives. By way of his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with a knife. The boys turned and ran back outside.   ‘Are you well?’ the man asked in English. Mona flies back to Albuquerque, and goes straight from the airport to the trailer where her husband has been waiting for her. He sat on the edge of the bed. On the table his outfit was ready and waiting. ‘Let me see it.’ I handed him the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the Scottish avant-garde). He felt too good for the Scottish papers and too isolated for the English ones, though when visitors beat a path to his door they weren’t always welcome. Nicholas Zurbrugg came for three days, leaving Finlay ‘not only exhausted but somehow furious at all such people’. Anathemas were pronounced. Harold Cohen was ‘never ...”

“... of reason and science would lead to a general reformation of religion and politics: ‘The English hierarchy (if there be anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble even at an air pump, or an electrical machine.’ After the French Revolution broke out, Priestley’s Birmingham laboratory was torn down by patriotic Church and ...”

“... since most of their peers ‘went off and became social workers and did courses on how to teach English as a foreign language or got a job in Greggs’ or ‘died or disappeared or went into seclusion, more like’. Airdrieonians grow up and stay put: they learn to make their own fun. (If they do leave, their insular earnestness makes them vulnerable.) The ...”

“... of its composition was in two general histories of music written in the 1770s and 1780s by the English antiquarians Charles Burney and John Hawkins. Three of the four surviving copies of the original publication ended up in Rome, and Hawkins received report from there of its being ‘one of the best’ of Victoria’s works. Burney, taking this up, called ...”

“... at a Spanish public. (Lorca’s works are listed here only in their Spanish editions.) For an English reader, it may be helpful to remember that Lorca remains a mythical figure in Spain, and it would no doubt be a biographer’s coup to offer definitive proof of his sexuality. Moreover, as Gibson (himself now a Spanish citizen) acknowledges, there is no ...”

“... language in which it could have been done. The selection of his poems in German, with the fine English versions of Michael Hamburger, has just been issued in a revised edition with some forty new translations. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is itself, in a sense, a voice out of the war, in which the philosopher has conducted himself with suicidal ...”

“... constrain the individual: history, imperial grandeur, Classicism, high culture – even villages. (Richard Hofstadter once explained how the ceaseless lure of land inhibited the growth of village settlements and led to the habit of continually pulling up stakes.) Repeatedly, in diaries, journals, letters, ‘official’ histories, promotional tracts and works ...”

“... the blow of phrase upon phrase, their cause as chancy as their end. John Bayley, the most English of critics, looks for truth by resorting to foreign parts of it. Or by subjecting home truths to the stress of foreignness. Russia and the USA are his main resorts, the one for fulfilment, the other for provocation. But his criticism has always enforced a ...”

“... is easy to come by: the author of ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’ is also the author of ‘To Richard Lovelace’, and of the vitriolic assault on the literary reputation of Tom May. Even by itself, the Horatian Ode is not easy to read: why, for example, did he hope Cromwell would be ‘to Italy an Hannibal’? Hannibal was on the wrong side, and ...”