“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... prose. The rhetoric of multiplicity is other than American (Robert Burton probably invented it for English prose) but both Bellow and McBain are probably hearing some rhythm from Whitman’s sometimes tedious but more often breathtaking echt American anaphoras, constructed to coast us as in a spaceship across an otherwise unparaphrasable vista of human data in ...”