“... 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 ...”

“... I suppose because the rasping quality in his voice echoed Auden’s harsh tones. However, because Richard Griffiths was available and indeed anxious to play the part, the role went to him. Emergency casting sessions such as the one Gambon knew we were holding are always mildly hysterical and often very funny as assorted names (often wildly unsuitable) are put ...”

“... of sensible is censured as an example of ‘low conversation’ in his Dictionary of the English Language). The thing most likely to have struck her was how easily and strongly his feelings were affected. ‘It was a love-match on both sides,’ Johnson said simply. He was born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to bring countries together than any number of EU directives.’ He quotes another political hero, Richard Cobden, the Manchester textile manufacturer and Anti-Corn Law Leaguer, who described free trade as ‘God’s diplomacy’, not bothering to notice that in the case of the redundant cotton weavers of Bengal, the casualties of cheap Lancashire cloth, God ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on, know no Arabic and see no Arabs. They create an exclusive (it’s also a very second-rate) English society quite cut off from the life of the town. I now begin to understand why British government has come to grief in India.’These words, written in 1923, might well have been Freya Stark’s a decade or so later. Freya, however, arrived at her view of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... watched their tongues when he was around. The rest, if they thought about it, imagined ‘Richard’ probably had to sign some nasty piece of paper in order to get out of Poland: so bloody what? After reading Domosławski’s compelling, exhaustive and often upsetting book, their easy tolerance – like mine – begins to look different. In the first ...”

“... his picture. If he gives the best account of the war from the other side that there has been in English, he neglects its significance in British political history. First blood was shed over a religious conflict, but far from the Black Sea. Ancient rivalries between eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics vying to control the holy places in Jerusalem erupted ...”

“... Richard Holmes published Shelley: The Pursuit in 1974. More than a decade later, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), he recalled how obsessive his engagement gradually became, not just with Shelley, but with that whole group of English expatriates associated with him, as it moved from Geneva through Italy – Bagni di Lucca, Este, Venice, Rome, Naples, Ravenna, Pisa – shedding some members and adding others, before finally disintegrating when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822 ...”

“... country in South-East Asia, he meant what ‘Vietnam’ nearly always means in post-1970s American English: the historical moment when Americans met themselves in a foreign mirror and were frightened by what they saw. ‘We were in the jungle,’ Coppola went on. ‘There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment – and little ...”

“... only very rarely permitting scholars access to any of it. But Helen Gardner, professor of English at Oxford, long-time admirer of Eliot’s poetry, a trusted critic and a friend of Valerie’s, was given unparalleled freedom to examine and quote from the correspondence, especially the treasure trove of Hayward’s papers bequeathed to King’s ...”