“... His family had been established in Norfolk since the late 14th century; his father, Sir Richard, was a cloth merchant (or mercer), who had thrived first on the patronage of Cardinal Wolsey and then of Thomas Cromwell, and had been knighted for his success in procuring foreign loans. Richard even had the nerve to ...”

“... as exemplar’. After he died in December 1918, Cecil’s proto-fascist ideology, a combination of English nationalism, guild socialism, racism and conspiracy theory, continued to be propagated in the Catholic Distributism preached by his widow, Ada, G.K. and their ally Hilaire Belloc.For Belloc, ‘the Jewish nation intermixed with other nations alien to it ...”

“... sociologist-philosopher Jean Baudrillard in America, the latest of his works translated into English. At first the reader might wonder why a prose as dense as his should be made more so by having it stretched across pages of a width and gloss more appropriate to an otherwise agreeably produced and illustrated coffee-table book. But if not actually ...”

“... place in concert programmes. Of later Lieder composers, Mahler is admired for his symphonies and Richard Strauss for his symphonic poems and operas.Wolf composed around three hundred Lieder, together with mostly minor orchestral works, the most significant being the Italienische Serenade (1892), several worthy choral works, and the opera Der Corregidor ...”

“... Henry VII, the first Tudor king, had died aged 52, in his privy chamber at Richmond Palace. But Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, though rarely straying from the king’s side in his last disease-ridden and paranoid years, had been away from court and nobody had bothered to tell them. More than that: a faction of the late king’s advisers had decided to ...”

“... July 1957, the young Lord Altrincham wrote an article ‘The Monarchy Today’ in the National and English Review, a journal he owned. It is doubtful whether any other editor in the country would have touched the thing. Altrincham called the Queen ‘a pain in the neck’, ridiculed her fatuous ‘my husband and I’ locution, and alleged that she was the ...”

“... range of the merest extra, was greeted with the sort of rapturously whooping applause for which an English stage actor would have had to wait all night, if not his whole career. Washington made a very good Brutus – another in the line of nobly unassuming popular heroes he has played in Hollywood for years – and since I was putting together a book of essays ...”

“... Everybody agrees mat the British, and especially the English, are suffering from an identity crisis. The standard explanation is loss of Empire and failure to find an alternative role. And yet in many ways it was the Empire which sowed the seeds of our present uncertainties. Until about 1800 the lineaments of national self-identity were fairly clear, but during the 19th century what it was to be British or English became a far more contested question ...”

“... Conrad, Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford, is convinced that a similar destiny was in store for the English writers of the 19th and 20th centuries who ‘imagined’ America during their visits to it. They imagined it not freely but in obedience to various pre-existent notions both about the continent and about themselves. The imaginative metamorphoses of ...”

“... makes it clear beyond doubt that Burke belonged, not to this ethnic-political entity, the ‘New English’, but to the ‘Old English’, of Anglo-Norman descent like the family names of Burke, Nagle and Nugent, and historically Catholic. His family were converts to the Church of Ireland, much like the conversos or ‘New ...”

“... survey of a ‘tradition of thought’, a ‘mode of feeling’, which Fred Inglis identifies as English and, in a vague sense, socialist. The tradition is characterised by ‘a habit of recourse to concrete examples in argument, a calm refusal of formal metaphysics, an unexamined criticism of “over-abstraction” (which means other people’s ...”

“... Many people firmly believe there was. We owe the widespread belief that Robin lived in the time of Richard I (1157-1199) to William Stukeley (1687-1765), an eccentric scholar of ancient British history who fabricated for him a crazy family pedigree going back to the Normans. Knight argues that the search for the historical Robin is as quixotic as the search ...”

“... discover during their visit.Discovering and presenting to the public new knowledge about the English country house is an admirable way for the National Trust to deepen and broaden appreciation of the complex histories of the buildings in its care. But the project has attracted fierce criticism from Conservative politicians and journalists who clearly ...”

“... of Advanced Study in Princeton. There Heidegger spends two years slowly and painfully learning English, aching for the chance once again to spellbind seminar rooms full of worshipfully attentive students. He gets a chance to do so in 1937 when some of his fellow émigrés arrange a permanent job for him at the University of Chicago. There he meets ...”

“... philosophy, too, was dead. After Russell, he was the last person who could, at any rate within the English-speaking world, make philosophy accessible to a general audience: from now onwards, it has condemned itself to be a hermetic subject. Today England seems to me so fundamentally backward-looking in its attitudes that it cannot celebrate any event unless it ...”