“... tournaments were expensive, lurid and boastful, teeming, jostling social occasions that were, as Richard Barber put it in Edward III and the Triumph of England, part Roman triumph, part circus. The last royal tournament of 1348 was held on 14 July, in Canterbury. ‘The costumes for the entry into the city,’ Barber writes, ‘required eight pounds of ...”

“... middle classes claims that East Lynne may be ‘one of the most famous unread works in the English language’. Very possibly. Yet it was spectacularly successful in its day, and its popularity has turned out to be more durable than that of most publishing sensations. Newly literate novel-readers in the mushrooming industrial cities consumed it with ...”

“... on the style of even eminent critics: for example, F.R. Leavis, who praises him in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932). Having spoken cogently and authoritatively of Yeats, De la Mare and Blunden, in the chapter ‘The Situation at the End of the First World War’, he becomes almost schoolgirlish (A-level and well-taught) when he gets to Edward ...”

“... his brother Philipp; George Boleyn, 2nd Viscount Rochford, and William Paget, 1st Baron Paget; and Richard Pate and Hugh Askew. This last lent itself to yet another interpretation of the anamorphic skull: that it was a visual pun on the sitters’ combined surnames (‘Pate Askew’). One member of the public optimistically suggested that either of the men ...”

“... achievement, combining the restless determination of Tschiffely’s Ride with a touch of Richard Jefferies or (among recent American naturalist-travellers) Edwin Way Teale. Moon uses a camera and a tape-recorder competently, but as aides-mémoire, not as mistresses. Between these covers are locked the perceptions of a reluctant solitary, perhaps, but ...”

“... and syntax (both quite dreadful). Gibran produced a small body of writings in Arabic and in English, and managed to be soupily soulful and vaguely prophetic in both languages. He also painted – Robin Waterfield’s biography is good on the recurring features of his art, including its ‘vague ectoplasmic figures, often female’ and the ‘veil of ...”

“... Somewhere behind this notion lies the legendary cable Hearst is supposed to have sent to reporter Richard Harding Davis and cartoonist Frederic Remington: ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.’ The line is echoed in Citizen Kane. The Cubans were already fighting for independence from the Spanish, and the US, the argument goes, liked the ...”

“... mind’. At 20, she began to write The Story of an African Farm. If she had been the child of an English Evangelical parsonage, she would have been conforming, in her struggle from faith to free-thinking, to a recognisable pattern. But Olive was self-created. It’s true that African Farm is, in some ways, much what might be expected from a young woman in ...”

“... a certain German Prince’, containing a list of names compiled by German agents: 47,000 eminent English men and women all engaged in ‘the propagation of evils which all decent men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia’. All of those named in the book were ‘prevented from putting their full strength into the war by corruption and blackmail and fear ...”

“... He is consequently dismissive of what he calls ‘le dolorisme’, a term not yet in use among English historians, although the thing itself is all too familiar from any school textbook, television documentary or heritage museum. The constant dwelling on the awfulness, suffering and injustice of past lives, as if that were the only significant thing about ...”

“... a lengthy visual and aural collage, a sort of television series trying to forget about television. Richard Brody describes the result as ‘a kind of working through on screen of the network of associations that formed in Godard’s movie-colonised unconscious’. The key idea here, which appears again and again in French thinking about cinema, is ...”

“... independent in 1957, she was away at school in England.In 1961, Busby took up a place to study English at the University of London, having convinced her parents that it would lead to a career in law. Instead, her first jobs were as ‘an assistant to an eccentric Romanian’ who ran an Anglo-French literary magazine from his home in Kensington, a reader in ...”

“... that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away more positive than I’ve ever been. I think we’re getting some momentum built up.’ I heard about happiness. I heard Lieutenant General James Mattis say that ‘it’s a lot of fun to ...”

“... more than individual taste is involved. He put the point more emphatically in a letter to Richard Aldington, who had initially been a very close collaborator but who by this date was showing signs of the touchiness and divergence of views which would eventually lead him to break with Eliot. Aldington had submitted a wayward, impressionistic essay on ...”

“... he gets rave reviews from all sorts of famous people. The president of the Federal Republic, Richard von Weizsäcker, sends Stern a note to tell him that he had read one of his lectures ‘with liveliest interest and gratitude’; McGeorge Bundy says that he thought another piece ‘uncommonly good’ and Lionel Trilling found an earlier draft of it ...”