“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... full of students who only leave when it closes at 8 p.m., and seeing these young Italians reading English books and magazines, watching videos and generally finding this a worthwhile place to be is immensely heartening. The British Council can still be thought a bit of a joke but like the World Service it’s a more useful investment of public money than any ...”

“... designed for use, and many of its books were secular. They attracted readers and disruption. Richard de Bury, an English bibliophile who knew the Sorbonne collection well, warned librarians to keep students away from their books, since they ate cheese while they read and dribbled fragments onto the page. Yet despite ...”

“... Arnold Kettle. The Kettles were well-known left-wingers, Arnold Kettle a Communist and lecturer in English at the university. They lived not far from us in Headingley and were eventually, though not I think at this time, customers at our butcher’s shop. Like Professor Needham, Mrs Kettle denounced the invasion of North Korea by the Americans and their use of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to young writers. Thom, who was often compared to Auden on account of being queer, famous and an English expatriate poet living in America, met Auden at least once. They didn’t particularly get along. Thom wasn’t at all catty about other poets (well, rarely), but at this late stage in his career Auden in public had become Auden. Thom remembered him going ...”