“... I suppose. An old lady’s hands, lying idle in a lap somewhere.1 June. Coming to the end of English Pastoral, James Rebanks’s second volume. It’s harder to read than A Shepherd’s Life, with the central section about the onset of factory farming not easy to take. Thankfully, though, in his own life at any rate the tide turns and Rebanks regains his ...”

“... trade. So did Cromwell and the Stuarts in an obsessive sequence of new laws to make sure that English trade was carried only on English bottoms – 1650, 1651, 1663, 1673 and on to 1696. Import bans whistled through Parliaments, most repellently the Irish Cattle Acts of 1663 and 1666, resisted only in the House of Lords ...”

“... victimised by ‘the Protestant tradition’ and by ‘the closely allied Whig tradition’. The English, being ‘not very fond of cardinals’, and not very fond of builders of royal power, have despised or caricatured Wolsey as ‘a royal favourite and a meddlesome priest’. Fertile as Gwyn’s challenge to that picture is, it has to be said that, like ...”

“... Maastricht or dismiss them as the post-prandial ruminations of the sort of men who select the English cricket team or oversee the starting arrangements for the Grand National. In fact, they were written by W.D. Rubinstein, who is no Blimp and is far from deranged. He is an American who is currently a professor at an Australian university. He was once the ...”

“... Jeremy Prynne what he thought of Captain Beefheart, he said he thought he sounded like Little Richard.’ Poodle Play is the Cambridge Poetry Festival on steroids. The exoskeleton recalls the papers delivered from the platform on that Saturday afternoon in King’s: selections from the Frankfurt School, carried aloft like placards in a Brecht play, moral ...”

“... metaphors, metaphors which from Lyly to Marvell became the defining mannerism of a whole school of English poets. What transforms this meticulous piece of scholarship from yet another dutiful account of how Donne and his contemporaries might have described their conceits in the terms of classical rhetoric, is Biester’s sense of the social context of ...”

“... Britain, but published, and perhaps completed, afterwards.) To live in America meant acquiring un-English ways to read. Heaney met Czeslaw Milosz, along with Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky, but the most important new acquaintance was the novelist Thomas Flanagan, who later wrote The Year of the French. ‘When I landed in California,’ Heaney says, ‘my head ...”

“... and the one that made him famous, clearly reworked his own experience of going, as a lecturer in English at Birmingham, to be a visiting academic at Berkeley. And he has never hesitated to report directly on his own life in a series of confessional essays, reflective prefaces and – a form in which he has been notably proficient – discursive ...”

“... that people will always refer to Scott Moncrieff when they speak seriously about reading Proust in English, but I’m not sure that a new translation has to ‘better’ his version, conspicuously or not. It’s unfortunate that neither Hazzard nor the editors at Farrar, Straus remembered that Prendergast’s first name is Christopher rather than Terence: the ...”

“... The greatest long poem in modern English letters began its life, unexpectedly, in the winter of 1798, in an uncomfortable lodging in Goslar, Lower Saxony, where Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy found themselves marooned for four miserable months. The weather was terrible – it was reputedly the coldest winter of the century – and leaving town was practically impossible: ‘When we left the room where we sit we were obliged to wrap ourselves up in great coats &c in order not to suffer much pain from the transition,’ Dorothy wrote home to their brother Christopher, ‘though we only went into the next room or down stairs for a few minutes ...”

“... responsibility for Americans who arrived without realising that hardly anyone in Algeria spoke English. Later that day I talked to the official in charge of liberation movements, Commandant Slimane Hoffman, a tank specialist who had deserted from the French army to join the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) and was close to Boumediene. I explained that ...”

“... a sovereign, independent state,’ while failing to notice that this distinction is shared by the English.) Mackay shares with his early 19th-century predecessor a desire to find in Mary a traduced national heroine whose time at last has come – although he acknowledges that Mary died a martyr not so much to Scottish independence as to the union between ...”

“... donnish joke. It all winds up with a postscript set in Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of Doctor Criminale, we must suppose – reads from his upcoming work, ‘whose ending he seems not to know’. The publisher’s blurb ...”

“... inconceivable number of novels and stories: more than four hundred, according to his current English publisher, Penguin.Simenon’s colossal output includes the 75 Maigret novels, dozens and dozens of shilling shockers in a variety of genres, a number of outright masterpieces in his ‘romans durs’, and many autobiographical books of an even-tempered ...”

“... them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the military victory over France a victory over French culture, Nietzsche writes, is a pernicious delusion, ‘not simply because it is a delusion ...”