“... in local English and describes itself as Tok Pisin (‘Pisin’ is pronounced like the French piscine) even though linguists (including Hurford) call it a creole. But how are pidgins to be distinguished from creoles? Terminology in this area is applied rather haphazardly. One reliable constant is that the three terms ‘jargon’, ‘pidgin’ and ...”

“... except their labour. In their 1979 case study of Terling, a village in Essex, Keith Wrightson and David Levine described a massive upward redistribution of wealth between 1525 and 1700, and descriptions of early modern society since theirs have been full of people like Edward Ballard, a ‘pore needy felloe’ with ‘noe certen place of aboad’ living apart ...”

“... in well-stocked libraries. A way of life that is in most essentials the exact opposite of a David Lodge novel, so that few of us care that the rest of the world smiles condescendingly at our shabby clothes, battered bicycles and collapsing brief-cases. And it is the job satisfaction that has gone. An increasing proportion of our time is devoted to ...”

“... acquisitive and devotional.This isn’t a totally new style in academic speaking and writing; as David Lodge has famously shown, the performative style of showbiz and avant-garde theatre entered academic cultural life in the Eighties through the very conference circuit that Paglia claims to despise. Jane Gallop’s skirt made out of men’s ties, Terry ...”

“... from the reality of unemployment (‘In Different Worlds’) – or the futility of Anglo-French ‘non-intervention’ in Spain (‘Heah. I say, fair play!’ Eden remonstrates with Fascist bullies assaulting Democracy in the street: ‘You shouldn’t encourage the aggressor, you know. After all, my friend and I aren’t trying to help his ...”

“... out by professional prudes as well as by the bookshops and circulating libraries themselves. The French judge and criminologist Louis Proal published in 1900 a weighty treatise on Le Crime et le Suicide Passionels, which was almost immediately translated into English. Proal, by no means a crude or a philistine writer, was inclined to think, as so many ...”

“... his permanent secretary.’ This is a very significant statement, and one with which I agree. French governments appear able to handle these situations with less difficulty, partly because they have in their gift a wide range of public appointments to which they can move top officials without too much loss of face. Even President Mitterrand’s socialist ...”

“... would be interesting to know how many British university libraries shelve Beckett’s books under French, not Irish, literature. Traitors sell their nationality, whereas writers, if they are well-known, find themselves trading on their nationality whether they like it or not. Neither traitors nor imaginative writers can ever fully discard what we choose to ...”

“... it until his death. After he had swallowed something once, he never stopped taking the medicine. David Caute begins The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (1973) with the story of Hewlett and Nowell escaping from the World Peace Council and clambering aboard a local bus going they knew not where and Hewlett saying to the driver: ‘Tickets ...”

“... accented German; perhaps in the former case the language barrier defeated Brahms (who had a little French) and Berlioz (who knew no German). In any event, the flavour of these extraordinary meetings continues to elude the most painstaking chronicler, as Macdonald most certainly is. It’s one thing to know that they happened, to map them in the mind’s ...”

“... that’s no bad thing: her blend of crackling violence and surreal wit often seems closer to David Lynch than Aquinas.The theological approach receives a predictably complete expression in Christine Flanagan’s edition of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at ...”

“... of these scripts: closely printed pages without a single indentation or paragraph break. In ‘French as a Literary Medium’, Griffiths informs his audience that, if they could see his script, they would not see any indication of ‘my accent or other tricks of my voice’. Such tricks included mimicry, funny accents, whispered passages and sudden bursts ...”

“... unbreakable spirit to win! Fighting the Hun with pepper? Was that something that Jimmy Perry and David Croft, the fecund scriptwriters of Dad’s Army, dreamed up in a dizzy moment? Not so. Charles Graves, an early historian of the Home Guard, refers to a unit which suggested in orders that any rudimentary weapons ‘could be usefully supplemented by a ...”

“... chose to file a libel suit against Grunewald. What followed turned into the political trial of David Ben-Gurion and his party, to which Kastner belonged. Grunewald was acquitted. Kastner, the German-born judge wrote, ‘had sold his soul to the devil’. In Zertal’s view this was the beginning of Ben-Gurion’s downfall. Worn out by the scandal, he ...”

“... depending on insider knowledge only others in the trade need feel troubled or titillated by. David Lodge, quoted on an Adair dust jacket saying that The Death of the Author is ‘brilliant, worthy of Nabokov’, is doing something of this kind, pretending innocence, tactfully avoiding the question of pastiche, of who’s actually in charge of this ...”