“... well, very beautiful and far more able than he is to speak about Pasternak’s work. Shilov’s English has that mixture of hesitation and surge normally associated with high-wire artists. At the end of every successfully negotiated sentence, he smiles like a performer being judged – radiant with nerves. As a diplomat, he is masterly. Faced with a ...”

“... with a damask vest and a hat with a rose on it, stood before the house and addressed him, first in English and then in French. He identified himself as Jean Le Clerc, the celebrated philologist and theologian from Holland who had edited the complete Latin works of Erasmus, produced a widely read periodical and written the first systematic modern manual of ...”

“... it for its relish of damnation. This is one of the many books which address the snobbery of the English, which flash at their readers the lawns of their country houses, the baize of their gambling-tables, which describe the behaviour of those virtuosos of ostentation and disregard who have in common a contempt for commonness, for the middle class. It could ...”

“... at the Hôtel Palais Royal on the same street. For a time she studied French literature and gave English lessons. But in 1917, by which time she could see bombing raids from the hotel balcony, she signed up as a farmhand. In October, she came back to the city. She was looking for a copy of the journal Vers et Prose when she crossed the Seine to visit ...”

“... Music at Darmstadt and the music he heard there – by Pierre Boulez, Edgard Varèse and the English twelve-tone composer Humphrey Searle, among others – made him feel sick. And while he recognised Coltrane’s improvisational genius, to Shankar’s ears the turbulence of the music opened a voyeuristic window into a troubled mind. The Indian classical ...”

“... however, is not forgotten, and when a new collection of her stories is published Eliot writes to Richard Aldington asking him to order a review copy: ‘I think her inflated reputation ought to be dealt with.’ There is now a peculiar tone in letters to Murry, one or two of which are almost like love letters: Thanks, dear John, for your adorable ...”

“... a part of the coastline which hasn’t yet been ‘polluted’ by the ‘Parisians and the English and Americans’. Between Saint-Raphaël and Saint-Tropez, by contrast, the rich forest land is currently being cleared for winter resorts. Here, for instance, is Saint-Aygulf, designed to attract successful artists from Paris; as yet unbuilt, but with ...”

“... between 1990 and 2009 found that 90.5 per cent of them were Deobandis. The would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid had Deobandi connections, as did the 2006 transatlantic airline bomb plotters and two of the 7/7 attackers. As Deobandis sometimes rather wearily point out, these concerns are not new. In 1875, less than ten years after the movement was founded, Sir ...”

“... in income, class status and the position of women, uncertainties that raised questions about English society and the place of the individual, especially the middle-class individual, within it. The characters in detective novels display differing degrees of nostalgia, hero-worship, uncertainty, prejudice and self-awareness. A restricted setting, such as a ...”

“... That Derrida has had considerable effect, whether for good or ill, on recent literary criticism in English cannot be denied, although there has been relatively little written on him by English-speaking philosophers (Richard Rorty being a notable exception). Many may think the peak of ...”

“... in people, people are in names.’ She was doyenne of the pseudonym. No other significant poet in English goes by initials. Hilda Doolittle also wrote under pen names – Delia Alton, Edith Gray, Rhoda Peter and Helga Dart – but she never published under any of them. Inscribing herself as H.D.  (well before Ezra Pound ushered her into literary history as ...”

“... Sarsfield [a Jacobite military commander], and the women of Limerick who fought and repelled the English during the siege of that city’; if he found himself accidentally singing a Protestant hymn, he would ‘spit out to cleanse my mouth’. As a ‘form of inquiry’, Samuel wrote in the LRB of 14 June 1990, history is a ‘journey into the ...”

“... exegesis, and the modern reader will find it exhausting, whether in challenging Latin verse or Richard Hillier’s excellent English translation.* Equipped with prose glosses and summaries quite early in its diffusion, the Historia Apostolica was a medieval bestseller. The great interest of the poem is the way its launch ...”

“... found in the pages of a book. Listen to this, for instance, from III Henry VI, a very early play. Richard, Duke of York has fatally lost a battle: … all my followers to the eager foe Turn back and fly, like ships before the wind, Or lambs pursu’d by hunger-starved wolves. His sons rally to him, and they counter-attack: With this we charg’d again; as ...”

“... with the horses they had not slaughtered for food.No prior record of success burdened the early English colonists. They could not afford the more languid colonialism of the Russian and French empires, whose fur traders established tributaries and commerce over the course of centuries, as well as making occasional attempts at the religious indoctrination of ...”