“... the tradition by issuing one counterfeit version after another of events in Kosovo. Since Richard Holbrooke, Washington’s Balkan fixer, brokered a rickety ceasefire last October, Milutinovic’s arguments have come with a plausible lustre – he invokes the UN Charter, the sovereignty of member states and so on – but his latest observation, that ...”

“... as builders of temples of high culture. An authorised biography has now appeared of an English dealer of recent memory, Robert Fraser, 1937-86. His chequered career, terminated by Aids, lasted as long as it did only because of subsidies from his parents and getting away with not paying his debts, while the world at large remembers him for pictures ...”

“... and two good sweaters.’ Jarrell and some of his fellow poets became very conscious of the English poets of the First World War. One of the first poems he wrote during the war, the satirical ‘The Soldier’, was titled after Rupert Brooke’s poem, in order, as he told his wife, ‘to compete’ with him. Karl Shapiro’s best-known war poem, or ...”

“... complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the English king’s great appetite, and her eyes, which are black and beautiful’. It was said, though not by unbiased observers, that after her marriage she aged rapidly and grew thin. If this is true, and we put it together with reports of a swelling in her ...”

“... unashamed fan of minor Hollywood pictures. Breathless, as Godard readily admitted, was inspired by Richard Quine’s Pushover and could be seen as the direct sequel to Otto Preminger’s Bonjour tristesse. The central character of the film, the petty criminal played by Belmondo, modelled his self-image on that of Humphrey Bogart in Mark Robson’s The Harder ...”

“... two hundred years, the history of the West End is still legible on the ground. Rules, the first English restaurant in the modern sense, has been in Covent Garden since 1798, Hatchards bookshop in Piccadilly since 1797. Bonhams and Christie’s, the auction houses where the spoils of the Napoleonic Wars were sold off, still host spectacular sales. In St ...”

“... Athanase’ (1817), his first attempt at terza rima, galumph along, as Shelley tries to cram his English sentences into Italian verse form:For none than he a purer heart could have,Or that loved good more for itself alone;Of nought in heaven or earth was he the slave.By the time he came to write The Triumph of Life, Shelley had realised that his syntax ...”

“... had come to town and no longer led entirely hidden lives.Hay makes the most of a vivid period in English and especially London history. Her carefully poised study puts Johnson, today an obscure figure, back at the centre of his circle. Once he has re-established himself in a new shop and lodgings at 72 St Paul’s Churchyard with a ‘little quaintly-shaped ...”

“... and had achieved a small but choice audience as editor of the Criterion. The newly established English Faculty at Cambridge, and especially I.A. Richards, had taken him up, and Middleton Murry, his predecessor in the lectureship and still a powerful name, had nominated Eliot as his successor to its sponsors, the fellows of Trinity. They had already offered ...”

“... in 1762. Too poor to complete his Oxford degree though more learned than his tutor, Johnson, like Richard Savage, his friend and the subject of his first biography, ‘having no profession, became by necessity an author’. Johnson begins his Life of Savage, published in 1744, with what we have come to recognise as characteristically authoritative ...”

“... our farms and factories’. The mutiny had shown Jones that a shared cause and enemy united the English people and ‘their Hindu brethren’.The jurist and Positivist Frederic Harrison drew a very different lesson from conflict in the colonies. ‘What is done in a colony today,’ he wrote when Governor Eyre declared martial law during the Morant Bay ...”

“... a short step to sceptical democratic liberalism in the manner of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin or Richard Rorty, and perhaps to a celebration of politics as the noble art of fostering conversation across doctrinal divides. But that isn’t the route MacIntyre took. For him, liberalism is no more than a front for capitalist individualism, seeking to reduce the ...”

“... is; advocates a written constitution; suggests a strategy for change; probes the meaning of English and British identity; and looks at the choices facing Tony Blair’. But it’s unreadable and hasty, ‘drafted between May and August 1997 and finalised after the events of September’. Barnett is himself ‘acutely aware of the missing references, the ...”

“... letters and journals, the funniest and most consistently readable extended self-portrait in the English language. Byron’s case, however, is exceptional. Perhaps no other project of authorial self-invention has been as successful – though there is a paradox here, because these self-inventions are often undertaken in response to a degree of external ...”

“... its spell. At the end of the fourth act of Henry V, the King asks his herald for details of the English dead at Agincourt. The herald hands over a paper, and the King reads: Edward, the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name; and of all other men But five and ...”