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“... Either you love the jokes or you don’t, with the Mitfords. The biting, ferocious ‘teases’, the flippancy, the apparent inability to take anything particularly seriously, are everything, not least because they encapsulate all that used to be good about Englishness, and all that is grotesque also. The jokes, always cruel, both charm and repel; without them, you’re left with girls in pearls living borderline tragic lives, or with the po-faced, lumpen Unity Mitford – galumph, galumph – who, unlike her five sisters (in descending order: Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Decca, Debo; there was also a brother, Tom), had little talent for levity ...”

“... yet more stuff in order to do so: for budgetary reasons (‘don’t forget normal libraries,’ India Knight urges), or maybe environmental ones (all those poor exhausted trees). And yet here the books are, regardless; and of course I’m going to read them. As if life wasn’t already hard enough – having to keep oneself groomed and going, no matter ...”

“... Richard Payne Knight was an important English intellectual of the era of the French Revolution. He flourished from the 1770s until his death, perhaps by suicide, in 1824. Most of that time he wielded great influence in the art world, as a leading collector, connoisseur and aesthetician, but as the theorist of potent subjects like myth and symbol he mattered almost as much to the poets ...”

“... David Gower was this year’s most popular victim, the English underdog, the handsome knight sacrificed by knaves. But good news is at hand: the hero has announced a brilliant season full of runs. In the tradition of General MacArthur, David Gower has announced his return. I hope he succeeds. But success is not the only thing that makes a hero ...”

“... seems to wear a different and diminished aspect from the sea of Lord Nelson’s day.’ Roger Knight’s life of Nelson is almost fifty times as long as Conrad’s centenary essay (excluding the appendices, which take up more than a hundred additional pages), but readers may nevertheless conclude that biography too is ‘different and diminished’ in our ...”

“... business in China, the ‘hedge-banking’ outfits in Australia, the executive levels of the East India Company. Later in the 19th century, in the second phase of industrialisation, the Clyde basin achieved something approaching world domination in shipbuilding, locomotive and bridge construction and other branches of heavy engineering. Overseas enterprise ...”

“... No blame attaches to the faithless husband. The tale comes from the French Book of the Knight of the Tower (1371-72), one of medieval Europe’s most popular conduct books. In 1483 Caxton translated the text, which circulated in German as well. Written to instruct his three daughters, the Knight’s book belongs ...”

“... at all remote) origins of British royal ritual; other contributions concern British rule in India and Welsh cultural identity (treated more respectfully than Trevor-Roper treats poor old Scotland). Eric Hobsbawm both introduces and concludes the book with essays of great penetration and learning on ‘the invention of tradition’ as a kind of ...”

“... and news from home, and then making for the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea and the coast of India. Their obvious prey was the shipping of those parts rather than the large, powerful East Indiamen, but that made things no pleasanter for the Company, which was held responsible for the doings of all Englishmen – and pirates, as the Company’s ...”

“... material security but unsure when it comes to handling the courtly ethos which is natural to the knight and the squire, appears to us with scarcely less realism than the people of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen.’ Ostensibly Holmes is only comparing the art, the ‘realism’, of Chaucer with that of novelists four centuries later. But the implication is ...”

“... intellectual escapism’, and proceeded to prove it with an analysis of the treatment of India and the Orient by the Romantic poets. In the 1780s, she said, Warren Hastings had hoped to rule India through Indians, without imposing a British civil service or a British army. For this purpose, he needed to sow a ...”

“... that had given the word ‘thug’ to the language came under terminal assault: the British in India, showing a zeal never displayed against England’s home-bred highwaymen, rounded up in six years 3266 devotees of thuggee, hanged 412 and imprisoned or transported hundreds more, extinguishing a centuries-old cult. The method of this religious fraternity ...”

“... threaded into an easy joke about reality. Quixote sees a barber’s basin and decides it is a knight’s helmet with a bit missing. It’s true the barber is wearing the basin on his head because it’s raining, but the narrator leaves us in no doubt as to the nature of the object. Quixote scares the barber, who jumps off his donkey and runs away, leaving ...”

“... been much weaker, not what their moves actually were during the long history of chess in India, Persia, the Islamic world and Medieval Europe. Although it thus has the character of Hamlet without the Prince, a chapter is at least devoted to the Medieval game: the forms played in Asia are dismissed in a page or two, or, sometimes, a line or two. Eales ...”

“... certainly have loomed large in Jacob of Sarugh’s conception of him: his mission (or missions) to India. That he came is an ancient tradition in India, and the core belief of a thriving Christian community there. According to the Mar Thoma Nazranis or St Thomas Christians of Kerala, whose current membership is about one ...”