“... cure was to give the Jews a land of their own. They would make Palestine as Jewish as England was English. Balfour supported Weizmann’s proposals to settle Europe’s ‘people apart’ in Palestine. In 1916 he became Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George’s coalition Government and in 1917 made the Zionist prescription British policy. The Declaration went to ...”

“... More generally, there is the literature on the corruption of the innocent which takes its cue from Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy and which is apt to picture every form of mass consumption as degenerate. Here – as in the writings of Jeremy Seabrook – it is the prosperity of the working class, rather than, or as well as, the poverty, which is the ...”

“... written for medical journals in a subsequent attempt to figure out her condition. In 1978, Richard Altick put together the pieces of her story in The Shows of London. Until very recently (as far as I could tell), Altick was the only person outside the medical profession who had written about her this century. Now Jan Bondeson, whose paper on her ...”

“... was to go to America to work with George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet. In a letter to Richard Buckle, Lincoln Kirstein described Nureyev ‘making peeeteeyous Russky noises’ about joining the company. But ‘Mrs K says defunutely: Nyet.’ The dance critics Arnold Haskell and John Martin denounced his ‘tragic’ mistake, his lamentable ...”

“... deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the ...”

“... who not infrequently joined professional bands in public performances at that time (the leading English amateur violinist and composer, John Marsh, complained in his journal that Haydn’s symphonies were also becoming too taxing for him). But for all their technical difficulty, Haydn and Mozart’s later symphonies were still written in the vernacular of ...”

“... doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. In a letter of 1818 to his friend Richard Woodhouse, Keats describes it like this:When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a ...”

“... is clear evidence that Shakespeare read and remembered Ovid’s Latin and was not confined to English translations. He alludes to or borrows phrases from all 15 books of Ovid’s great mythological poem, the Metamorphoses. He also knew the Fasti (a poetic calendar of the Roman year), the Heroides (verse letters to absent lovers) and parts at least of the ...”

“... High Court action, in July, 1987, had everything. A loyal wife. A weeping prostitute. An un-English ‘sneak’ in the shape of a rich Pakistani lawyer. But most of all it had Mr Justice Caulfield, whose summing-up contained sentiments and phrases which quickly passed through the courtroom door and into folklore. He asked the jury to ponder the ...”

“... set out, systematically, in a monumental book, Higher Cortical Functions in Man (translated into English in 1966), and, in a wholly different way, in a biography or ‘pathography’ – The Man with a Shattered World (which appeared in English in 1973). Although these books were almost perfect in their way, there was a ...”

“... ed., 1951), where he argued that modernisation seriously misrepresents Elizabethan English when it changes ‘murther’ to ‘murder’, ‘mushrump’ to ‘mushroom’, ‘vild’ to ‘vile’, ‘wrack’ to ‘wreck’, and so forth. Less controversially, he indicated that modernisation can in some cases destroy rhymes, and hinder the ...”

“... so-called ‘Greek Exercises’, was written (as a disguise) in Greek characters, though it is in English, over a period of a year in 1888-9. It primarily contains Russell’s thoughts about God and immortality, with some excursions into ethics such as the one from which I quoted. It also contains his comments on the sermons at the various churches he ...”

“... Bovary provides evidence that the handshake was still regarded, in France in the 1850s, as an English custom. Roodenburg might have added Jane Austen’s novels, where handshakes are the usual form of greeting. But to Austen a gesture is interesting only insofar as it allows inferences to be made about the intentions of its originator. Knightley indicates ...”

“... In very recent years, however, things have begun perceptibly to change. The influence of the Plain English campaign, championed by Margaret Thatcher, has begun to be noticeable throughout Whitehall, and some truly simple legislation has started to appear. The Human Rights Bill, designed to bring the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law and now ...”

“... improvement (he was among the first to import merino sheep) but also to his rootedness in English soil. Far from wishing to enlarge the royal prerogative, Roberts tells us, George was devoted to the settlement of 1688. ‘The pride, the glory of Britain, and the direct end of its constitution, is political liberty,’ he wrote in one of his essays for ...”