“... version of ‘I need him in the (eye-)balls.’ There is also a great knockabout scene where the (English) cineast who cares only for austerity meets the (American) moviegoer who has never heard of any film made before The Godfather. ‘Don’t you think that Welles is rather overrated?’ ‘Definitely. I went there with Dad last month, and Bath’s a lot ...”

“... epic’. We might also compare him with the hero-villains of Shakespeare, with Brutus, Macbeth or Richard III, raging at the ghosts of their victims. Francis Phelan is not a pathetic old man: he is frightening. When we walk guiltily past the alcoholic tramps of Charing Cross, there are some who seem too degraded to be helped and others who seem too ...”

“... him to remain hidden, the man in the mask, detached, even disdainful. The walking embodiment of Richard Sennett’s 18th-century public man, Cuvier vigilantly kept up his public front in an age increasingly given over to effusions of Romantic sincerity and authenticity. The real Cuvier thus remains concealed for good behind the smokescreens of ...”

“... Contamine’s indispensable survey, War in the Middle Ages, now available in a welcome and clear English translation by Michael Jones, offers us a naming of parts for the study of war: ‘military skill, armament, recruitment, composition and life in the armies, moral and religious problems posed by war, the relationship between war and its political and ...”

“... in her book – and fully acknowledged. Readers who found Dr Hill’s recent book, Milton and the English Revolution, stimulating but not entirely convincing are likely to harbour similar reservations about aspects of Puritanism and Theatre. ‘Few playwrights,’ Miss Heinemann states, ‘seem to have experienced the close citizen and Parliamentary ...”

“... gal pal’ takes him by the bespoke elbow and murmurs: ‘This place is kinda nice – English.’ George is holding a copy of that morning’s Los Angeles Times, which reports details of the Rodney King trial. Now for all I know, George is so devoted to South Central LA that he holds a weekly acting workshop in Lynwood, but if he’s anything like ...”

“... Star declares here, and his collection offers helpful accounts of influential thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Benedict Anderson and the radical-turned-Neo-Conservative historian Eugene Genovese, as well as thoughtful reviews of significant debates, such as the contested legacy of Darwin (Stephen Jay Gould v. sociobiology), the stake of revisionist ...”

“... we turn to the main business, a sketch of his explanation of why a ‘meme’ (read ‘idea’ in English-language editions) can become widely accepted in a culture: It’s because the meme is beneficial. And to whom does the benefit accrue? Why, to the meme. ‘In the domain of memes, the ultimate beneficiary . . . is: the meme itself.’ And what is the ...”

“... The woman who forms the subject of her book and who played so prominent a role in Nazi Germany was English: Winifred Marjorie Williams, born in Hastings in 1897. Orphaned at an early age, she came to stay in Oranienburg, near Berlin, with distant relatives, the aged Wagnerians Henriette and Karl Klindworth, in 1907. Karl had studied with Liszt, founded a ...”

“... of it. That at least is what we hope, though we are not permitted by Kadri to forget the English miscarriages of justice of the 1970s, which produced the sardonic maxim ‘Innocent until proved Irish’. Here, however, it is at least reasonable to think that the procedures introduced in 1984 for excluding all but tape-recorded police interviews ...”

“... and shares it. And he goes out of his way to provoke it. There is no more relentless pronoun in English-language poetry than Frederick Seidel’s ‘I’. ‘Everything in the poems is true,’ he told New York magazine in 2006. ‘You should take them at face value.’ The de rigueur response to such a claim is provided by ...”

“... Pope adds in a manuscript comment that he may have had from the struggling poet and hellraiser Richard Savage. In typically tantalising style, Curll alleged in print that the ill-matched babes were ‘Offspring of a Poet and a Bookseller’. The first task for any Haywood biographer, plainly, is to clear away the flak and innuendo. Some years ago, King ...”

“... not extend to lesser breeds within Europe, and certainly not beyond. He and the Liberal politician Richard Cobden believed that general amity would be reinforced by free trade and benign capitalism. Socialist thinkers, on the contrary, sought the abolition of capitalism and classes, and eventually of sovereign nations as well. Marx despised the wishy-washy ...”

“... leading to a kind of papal absolutism, which some might see as a reasonable description of Richard Dawkins.) Hobsbawm, however, points out that Marx was actually too generous to the bourgeoisie, a fault of which he is not commonly accused. At the time of The Communist Manifesto, their economic achievements were a good deal more modest than he ...”

“... the postmodern devices he occasionally toys with – to his recently, and suddenly, estranged English wife, who is pregnant with their child but whose undenied anti-semitism, as Zuckerman sees it, makes it impossible for him to remain with her. This letter, which opens with an image of Balzac calling out for his characters from his deathbed, is at once a ...”