“... American citizen and, by 1897, professor of mathematics at the new University of South Dakota. Richard Pipes’s The Degaev Affair is the first book-length treatment of the extraordinary lives of Sergei Degaev: his double role as revolutionary and agent provocateur up to 1883, and his subsequent life in America, a life so utterly distinct from what ...”

“... are here Missing in Action. Entirely absent, or mentioned only in passing, are Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Yoo, Elliott Abrams, Ahmed Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, Rick Santorum, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Richard Armitage, Katherine Harris, Ken Mehlman, Paul O’Neill, Rush Limbaugh. Barely appearing at all are John ...”

“... this, in turn, ‘launched her into a lifetime course of reading, beginning with Chaucer in Middle English, moving on to Erasmus, Donne, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and even Finnegans Wake’. In this case, the visit to the local library was repaid with interest: under the name of Catherine Cookson, McMullen went on to write more than ninety ...”

“... large numbers of leading intellectuals, from, say, Herbert Spencer through H.G. Wells and on to Richard Hoggart and beyond, exhibited no such consanguinity.However, even if many of the more sweeping generalisations about the social homogeneity of intellectuals in Britain prove on closer inspection to be false, it remains true that some families do appear to ...”

“... in 1915 to Ottoline Morrell. The war had ravaged Lawrence. Before it began he had felt that English life was on the edge of a resurrection. The slaughter in France undermined his foundations. Lawrence was given, like Céline, to overstatement: ‘It would be nice if the Lord sent another flood and drowned the world,’ he wrote to Lady Ottoline. This is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of 17th-century ballads, which supplied Bishop Percy with material for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Pepys himself was remembered, if at all, as a naval administrator who’d had a compulsion for buying up printed paper. The library’s catalogue – it wasn’t a secret – listed six volumes of his diaries, but no one read them. The sentences ...”

“... with government – over minimum standards for all council housing. And although I see that both Richard Haslam and Jonah Jones credit him with authorship of the splendidly rude, punchy, near-libellous DIA Cautionary Guide to St Alban’s (1929), I am surprised that some credit doesn’t also go to what is surely the echo of that same ...”

“... I actually fell over yesterday on my birthday.24 May. It occurs to me that the whole course of English history would have been changed had there been in the bedroom on the wedding night of Catherine of Aragon and Prince Arthur the equivalent of a raddler, the dauber who paints the ram so that it leaves a mark when it has served the sheep. Raddle Prince ...”

“... with Steinbeck’s Charley), I was pretty sure I could have taught him to speak a few words in English. The landscape unfolded, changing only because the light was changing. The truck’s bench seat had springs that poked most of the way through on the driver’s side, and the result of a couple of hours sitting on it was searing pain. Adding to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Bohemia (who reigned from 1253 to 1278): hence ‘King’s Mountain/Hill’ or Königsberg. One English casualty in the Baltic in 1368, probably at the siege of the Lithuanian stronghold of New Kaunas, was Sir Anthony de Lucy the Younger. He was returned for burial to a comparably bleak shore in a western land far away where paganism was long extinct, in ...”

“... 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 ...”