“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... nevertheless has his forerunners: Byron’s Manfred and Milton’s Satan, to mention only familiar English prototypes. In spite of his self-proclaimed baseness, he frequently wins our sympathy, for instance in his role as an irreverent latter-day Prometheus. Speaking to the abject Creator, he warns him:I shall hit your hollow carcass – so hard that I ...”

“... awards. She can think on her feet and speaks in forthright, easy to follow Japanese (and similar English – she went to a Quaker high school in Philadelphia). On screen and off, she retains the common touch made famous by her father, son of a bankrupt horse-dealer, who left school at 13. Tanaka père was one of the first Japanese politicians to scent the ...”

“... unsettling realisation that the colonists were justified in their complaints. From Edmund Burke to Richard Price, observers across the political spectrum struggled to see much evidence of British liberty in the crass mismanagement that led to the Revolution. Some even followed Jefferson, who in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence blamed Britain ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”