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“... are the hotels the Mob built, monuments of the decadent, lavish mid-century Cuba depicted in T.J. English’s The Havana Mob. As their uniform architecture suggests, they were all built during the period bookended by the reigns of Fulgencio Batista, who seized power in 1952, and Fidel Castro, who sent him packing on New Year’s Eve less than seven years ...”

“... maybe the west tower Of Weasenham St Peter’s, ‘unbuttressed’, says Pevsner, ‘Early English … Note the remarkably ornate north side (Perp), with flushwork decoration.’ It was just over the hill, goddamn it!                                     Major prize for the first … Ruby stood in the road, hands on ...”

“... the contemporary shrug. I almost prefer it to the residual symptoms of Cézannoia, especially the English variant of the condition. There’s a bit of all this about in the room at the Courtauld. Well-bred pagans hanging on to the old gods in face of Christianity (or postmodernism), exchanging glances in the deserted temple. My grey beard had company. Oh, but ...”

“... Paul Nash​ is as close as we come, many think, to having a strong painter of the English landscape in the 20th century. The uncertainties built into the wording here are part of the point: Nash spent his working life trying to decide if ‘the English landscape’ was something that had an existence, as a value for art, beyond, say, 1918; and what the difference was, in landscape painting, between strength and histrionics; and whether remaining ‘a painter of the English landscape’, with all that followed in terms of a settling of accounts with Constable and Turner, and Blake and Palmer, and Crome and the watercolourists and Ford Madox Brown, was at all compatible with being a painter ‘in the 20th century ...”

“... indeed, the very voice of modernism – about Albert Moore and Flaming June. There is, however, an English counter-proposal on this very question of nature and beauty, and Arscott’s book has opened our eyes to it. If for some reason the eternal untouchable middle distance of landscape-in-the-eye is foreign to us on our island, or unattainable, then let there ...”

“... are depicted as the aristocratic Lampreys in the detective story Surfeit of Lampreys. Her view of English society is formed by this first encounter, and persists throughout her novels – to their detriment, it might be considered. In 1955 a BBC memorandum, considering the adaptation of Scales of Justice, remarks: ‘We would have to eliminate the appalling ...”

“... Goethe?’ The rest of his essay title supplied the answer: ‘An Enquiry into English Attitudes of Non-Liking towards German Literature’. In the introduction to their translation of the Italian Journey (1962), W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer sought to explain and excuse British ignorance of, and indifference to, Goethe by drawing ...”

“... industry – it was Bognor with a large dash of Grimsby. In August 1887 fish packers set on three English boats trying to undersell the locals, and gendarmes shot dead six or more of the rioters, wounding scores of others (the numbers are disputed) before order returned. There is a drawing at the Academy called The Strike, but its first title seems to have ...”

“... out of Soviet literature since the Twenties. It is pleasingly coincidental that its appearance in English should coincide with the first appearance in the Soviet Union of Nabokov’s works, for it is, both in tone and manner, undeniably Nabokovian. Where Rybakov deals with a group, Bitov probes an individual; where Rybakov employs a wide, panoramic sweep and ...”

“... and where he ended up is another matter.) The question remains why. What stood in the way of the English doing as well as the Czechs or the Dutch? My answer begins from the special hold here of class on culture. The culture of art in England is genteel. It is tied to Home Counties, late-imperial class values and attitudes in ways – with a depth and ...”

“... times I sat staring at the Van Gogh zigzag crows over a cornfield – I had no idea that they were English sunbeams over NW1 – but slowly, and not as a result of an act of judgment (or not one I was aware of), the painting took hold of me. I still didn’t dare, or didn’t bother, to ask who had done it. It took hold of me, and I began to see not just that ...”

“... Blake’s intentions … Blake’s poems, especially his epics, seem to me the best poetry in English since Milton, but about Blake’s illustrations my judgment is uncertain. Some of them seem to me very powerful, some do not; but I am in any case not qualified to criticise them. As a critic I have tried to be true to my own experience in reading and ...”

“... published in the grimness of Ghent. (‘Revolutionary buccaneering’ is about as close as English can get, and nothing will quite dispel the image of bores in the Senate.) The book is a sequel to the earlier story, but a bizarre and catastrophic one. The dead hero of Noli me tangere reappears, resurrected, hiding behind a pair of dark blue ...”

“... into more thoroughly. From Romanticism onwards (German Romanticism is quite unlike the French or English versions), a powerful anti-intellectual strand dismissed any display of critical intelligence in favour of a half-mystical, naive spontaneity. What marked the writer out as a Dichter, in verse or in prose, was an immediate response to beauty, a refusal of ...”

“... been eager to declare obsolete beyond redemption. But other schemata are possible, such as the ‘English’ and ‘American’ varieties (though both sorts are written in both places). The English model, as famously discussed by Auden in his essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, is essentially hermetic (the country weekend, the ...”