“... 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 ...”

“... Ionce​ asked the great historian Richard Southern whether he would like to have met any of the medieval saints and churchmen about whom he wrote so eloquently. He gave a cautious reply: ‘I think they probably had very bad breath.’ He may have been right about that, but it would be wrong to infer that this was something which didn’t bother them ...”

“... was embraced by communist scientists in the West, above all by Haldane (who wrote a preface to the English translation of Engels’s Dialectics of Nature) and by the crystallographer J.D. Bernal in his 1939 book The Social Function of Science. By then, however, Stalin had dragooned science and scientists in the USSR into following a rigid party line, and in ...”

“... pointed out that most of its victims suffered from diseases that were neither new nor rare. As an English word ‘asthma’ goes back to the 16th century. And when Sherlock Holmes in the ‘Adventure of the Norwood Builder’ (1903) greets John Hector McFarlane, who has just burst unceremoniously into 221b Baker Street, with the words ‘you mentioned your ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to talk, from the same class background as myself. His clothes were of a different weave; his English was different. And this, along with the fact that he was from Pakistan, not to speak of an openness and charm he had, was one of the reasons for my being attracted to his company. There are many upper-middle-class people in South Asia (as there probably ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... out, in the words of the King of Brobdingnag, as a pernicious race of little odious vermin. Even Richard Rorty, the self-styled postmodernist liberal, felt able to pronounce that cruelty was ‘the worst thing we do’. Torture has posed a problem for philosophers. Simple utilitarianism has notorious difficulties in explaining why torture or other such abuse ...”

“... and although his knowledge of Greek literature seems to have been mediated through Latin and English translations, he knew Plutarch well through Sir Thomas North’s version of the Parallel Lives, and is likely to have kept up with the publication of Chapman’s Homer. Successive chapters of Burrow’s book explore Shakespeare’s engagement with ...”

“... realised that things had gone wrong as soon as I arrived at my hotel. The receptionists spoke no English. Only when I showed them my passport did they seem to accept, with reluctance, that I had a booking. I was given a key and took my own bag upstairs. The room was a cramped, overfurnished space with thin brown walls. On the desk was an envelope of ...”

“... tells the story in The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel, that the novelist stationed himself in the English department’s outer office, in sight of the faculty mailboxes, the morning after Howe’s review reached subscribers in Colorado. A few of his colleagues congratulated him, but most said nothing. Williams stayed there all day, Shields says, then went ...”

“... made its initial move from exteriority to interiority doesn’t much concern Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman. Their book is an essay on the ‘historical construction and the political uses of trauma’ and a report on anthropological fieldwork aimed at ‘denaturalising’ it and ‘repoliticising victims’. Working in a Foucauldian tradition, they ...”

“... in classical literature, both men learned to be professional writers in that decisive period of English cultural history when economic conditions, combined with the enhanced prestige of the vernacular as an instrument of emergent nationalism, first made such a career possible. They also exercised their trade at a time when, as a consequence, the idea of ...”