“... at Windsor. A rather bizarre legacy funded seven ‘superannuated or disabled lieutenants of English men of war’ to pray daily in the stalls for the souls of dead royalty and the reigning sovereign. Aside from that, they were expected, required even, to do nothing. It looked like the perfect solution for Holman to live a quietly crippled life. He was ...”

“... embodying a design in brick, stone, steel – takes on its proper importance. In the heroic age of English engineering, engineer-contractors like the Stephensons dominate. Professional institutions have encouraged their members to keep the commercial side of building at a distance. Architects had little trouble staying in line; the Perrets (there were three ...”

“... street was demolished in 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no front steps or front gardens. Number 10 was the last house on the left, jammed up against the wall of a ...”

“... questions that they askd was, when it would thunder. Joseph Banks, The ‘Endeavour’ Journal Richard Holmes describes The Age of Wonder as a ‘relay race of scientific stories’ about the explosion of exploration and scientific achievement in England between two celebrated voyages, Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation of the world in the ...”

“... James Fox’s articles in the Sunday Times and the New Review saw in it the ‘whole waterlogged English class system’ sinking under its own weight. But the system has proved remarkably buoyant. Old Etonians and alumni of the Bullingdon Club continue to thrive. By contrast their antagonists of forty years ago, the police and the press, have fared less ...”

“... that one has AIDS may not lead to restraint: on the contrary, some AIDS patients, according to Richard Fisher, have described becoming reckless, through despair and a sense that there was now little to lose. ‘They throw themselves into sex,’ as he puts it, ‘in every bar, bath and cottage.’ The role of these bath-houses has been crucial in the ...”

“... an aura of wild improbability over even such presumably real events as a press reception for the English Country Cheese Council. Learning that George Best is for sale for £200,000, he toys with the idea of using a recent legacy to buy him as ‘a companion on my occasional visits to the night club scene of our metropolis’, but reflecting that Best has a ...”

“... Berg thus prepares the ground for her comment that it was not a big step for Marx then to take English radicalism and Engels to their limits, and concludes her book by quoting this passage from Marx: ‘Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are ...”

“... another occasion, however, Coward does admit it. In 1955 he writes: Another book I am reading is Richard Aldington’s blistering, debunking attack on Lawrence of Arabia. I do not care for Richard Aldington’s mind, and his malice is a little too apparent; nevertheless quite a lot of it ’ as far as I have read ...”

“... 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 ...”