“... in rows and the lectures were practical rather than intellectual. Shepherd was an exception. Her English literature class was for her students’ educational benefit rather than that of the children they might one day teach. ‘I loved her from the first class we had with her,’ my mother said. When my parents moved out to Cults a decade or so later, she ...”

“... sources: Teutons, Anglo-Saxons, Celts and even the Belgians. But things could get tangled. Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities concerning the Most Noble and Renowned English Nation (1605) asserted that the Irish tongue was originally German, and was spoken by Adam and ...”

“... radio and founder of the Trumpist student movement Turning Point. On the eve of NatCon London, an English conservative commentator told me that the National Conservative worldview was ‘far too American’ to gain traction in the UK. ‘National Conservatism is just an imported name. The fact that Michael Gove feels so comfortable appearing at NatCon shows ...”

“... to be elusive. Oakeshott has most frequently been taken as the wayward voice of an archetypical English conservatism: empirical, habitual, traditional, the adversary of all systematic politics, of reaction no less than reform; a thinker who preferred writing about the Derby to expounding the Constitution, and found even Burke too doctrinaire. The amiably ...”

“... of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of Marske Moor in Swaledale to create a new ...”

“... to build careers on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal ...”

“... in turn meant that such emotion was truer than anything else about the British psyche (the end of English reserve).In other words, faced with this public display of feeling, we could only cry ‘true’ or ‘false’. Is there any authority on which such judgments can be made? Or is it the need to judge, whether for or against, that is paramount, as if ...”

“... thing. I was just screaming. Listen to “a wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom”’ – a Little Richard vocal line (garbled) from ‘Tutti Frutti’. ‘Don’t get the therapy confused with the music.’ And what’s true (and ‘simple’ and ‘real’) of the voice is also true of the instrument: How do you rate yourself as a guitarist? Well, it ...”

“... of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves into the breach on wet ...”

“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”

“... for other ways out: the culture here is excursionary, touching on far more than the merely ‘English’. There is a good familiarity with American poetry, tending out of Objectivism, through Black Mountain, Beat, the ‘New York school’ and on, much later, to the more detached experimentalism of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers whose notion of ...”

“... or ‘servile’). The opening cry is almost as much a problem. How can ‘Debout!’ go into English (‘Arise!’ is dreadful)? It wasn’t until Socialist Songs in Chicago in 1900 that ‘ye wretched of the earth’ was hit on as an equivalent to ‘les damnés de la terre’ – the ‘ye’ too familiar, maybe, but ‘wretched’ a great leap. (I ...”

“... trial, massacre, impoverishment and exile. All for him to join the dictators’ club? For Wales, Richard, for Wales? Arafat’s father, Abdel Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini, brought his children up with the illusion that he would win title to stolen ancestral property in Egypt. In pursuit of the elusive inheritance, Abdel Raouf, a mild man in a fez with oversize ...”

“... an Irishman’s unconscious equation of Ireland with a virgin and thus of the six counties with an English penis). Why should we suppose that Jones was any less idiotic when he left the public domain? Hopkins deplores criticism like Popper’s which uses invented examples, and asks us to consider ‘such real and testing examples of behaviour as are provided ...”

“... argument, as there are, however, in recent alternatives to it. In his Shelley: The Pursuit (1974) Richard Holmes decided that both Claire and Elise had been pregnant by Shelley, that Claire’s pregnancy had aborted, and Elena was Elise’s baby. Claire Tomalin, in Shelley and His World (1980) argued more reasonably that the child was Claire’s; and in a ...”