“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Lilies comes from a 14th-century manuscript of the Grandes Chroniques, a remnant from the medieval English royal library, now in the British Library: it depicts the Battle of Gisors in 1198 between the armies of Richard I of England and Philip II.The chroniclers’ shaping of the public perception of these kings, and their ...”

“... what a talent they had hired: Cockburn had long since read and absorbed almost the entire body of English literature, emerging as a wonderfully fluent and vivid writer. But his salary didn’t come close to paying for his untidy, riotous life in a huge Kurfürstendamm flat, and it wasn’t until 1929 that Dawson offered him a steady job as a subeditor in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at least until Peaky Blinders came along? In my experience, nobody, not even Oswald Mosley or Richard Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he ...”

“... a visualisation, for urban eyes, of the simple datum that the city is parched.Six years ago Richard Thake, a Conservative politician from just north of St Albans, pointed out at a summit called to address the crisis that Hertfordshire was the heaviest consumer of water per head in England. ‘If we go on at this rate,’ he warned, ‘we are in danger ...”

“... if there were something saintly about him.After his death in 1936, Chesterton was neglected by English departments more interested in The Waste Land than in rollicking ballads of the English road. But he still fascinated enough people to be given hagiographic treatments in the 1980s and 1990s by Alzina Stone Dale and ...”

“... indeed in England, with the result that, in the later 19th century and the first half of the 20th, English history became the intellectual laboratory within which ideas about the character or distinctiveness of the new type of society were explored.A common thread in the variously inflected accounts of this transformation was the claim that, alongside the new ...”

“... view. (‘You are sure to lose it,’ Harris told him. ‘You haven’t a dog’s chance and the English despise the beaten.’) Just then, however, Douglas arrived and berated Harris for his advice. When Douglas stormed out of the restaurant, Wilde followed, saying: ‘It is not friendly of you, Frank, it really is not friendly.’ He was not going to take ...”

“... fiction of Elie Wiesel to George Steiner’s ruminations in In Bluebeard’s Castle and Richard Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History. But to insist on the uniqueness of the event is a short step to insisting on the exclusiveness of interpretation which asserts an empathetic privilege and even a Jewish proprietorship in the subject. Seven years ...”

“... for imminent invasion, the Dutch sailing up the Thames. Paranoia runs deep, it runs all through English literature, and it is often associated with the river. You arrive at a sensationalist hack like Sax Rohmer with his fear of the Chinese. He wrote a book called The Devil Doctor, published in 1916. Cover illustrations for cheap railway editions show Fu ...”

“... to release these documents. This is rather like writing about the Watergate scandal and applauding Richard Nixon’s forthrightness in finally handing over the White House tapes. If the citizens of Hanford are unable to accept what really happened there it wouldn’t be unusual. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Françoise Zonabend’s The Nuclear ...”

“... absurdly cumbersome, and seems to have been, if not the originator, then the promulgator of pidgin English: when his interpreter admitted there was nothing the Chinese could do about their dishonesty since it was innate, Anson transcribed this in A Voyage around the World as ‘Chinese man very great rogue truly, but have fashion, no can help.’ Still, they ...”

“... stalk. Now shoot him just at the base of the left ear for kindness.’ The macaronics cross Saxon English with Berlitz Swahili: ‘Keiti says you mganga with the lion.’ And the once effective sententiae sound like Poor Richard staring into the bottom of the glass: ‘Everybody does other people harm’; ‘Nothing is as ...”