“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Such information had in fact survived antiquity, and much of it had already been translated into English, but the required texts concentrated on war, politics and ethics. Now, by contrast, the life story of the notorious courtesan Neaera, with its episodes of gang rape, blackmail and fraud, is parsed, discussed and analysed in the first-year Greek book used ...”

“... Three or four years ago, a friend of mine was asked to illustrate a Teaching English book for the Ministry of Education in Cairo. He was (is) an Egyptian, but an Egyptian from outside officialdom – a cartoonist. He painted a series of charming and instantly recognisable street scenes: stacked green-grocers’, lemonade vendors, decked-out taxicabs, dust-carts pulled by donkeys ...”

“... his new book’s title a certain resonance.) At the same time, Austin’s fastidiousness with the English tongue was ‘an essential half of what my father despaired of for himself (eloquence was the other half), who possessed by the time I came into his life no ordinary language, his Russian and Polish fragmentary, his Hebrew primitive, his Yiddish ...”

“... the years since 1978. Romola herself had allowed a portion of the notebooks to be translated into English and published in 1936, in an edition from which she excised most of the erotic material, a great deal of the obsessive repetition, and all the execrable poems. Until now, all translations into other languages were made from that ...”

“... descended on Atkinson. A man from the Daily Express asked her to explain what Post-Modernism was; Richard Hoggart, chairman of the Whitbread judges, said that Atkinson had written a Post-Modern novel, but might not know it. (She did the whole thing absent-mindedly, perhaps, while polishing brass doorknobs.) The Daily Mail sent a woman who found the author ...”

“... that is sought in sexual connection.’ The only tolerant remarks about homosexuality made by an English intellectual to have survived from the early 19th century are Bentham’s. But the Utilitarians are more often yet another stumbling-block for the seeker of sexual free spirits in the period. James Mill’s belief in the felicific calculus, and disdain ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the afternoon. This interest in good looks was hardly surprising. From the age of eight, the English upper middle class were incarcerated for 35 weeks in the year in boarding schools, and from there passed to the seminaries of Oxford and Cambridge. From the age of eight they were introduced to two mythologies – that of the Bible and that of Ancient ...”