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“... with Japanese to a degree he makes plain even to me who know not a syllable of the language, Richard Bowring has forfeited some command of English. That looks all the likelier when he skids into bad grammar: ‘ ... sent to whomever was to copy out the story’. Or perhaps both the ‘indiscrete’ and the ...”

“... honing his diplomatic skills in the last decades of Edward III, surviving the tumultuous reign of Richard II (1377-99), and gaining the favour of Henry IV before what must have been a rather sudden death in 1400. To contextualise his career, Turner provides an extensive political, social, economic and cultural history of England over the second half of the ...”

“... is problematical. This book packs some of the nastiest shocks since Richard Walker in The Savile Row Story (1988) disinterred a Lloyd’s Weekly News headline on a sweatshop exposure of 1892: ‘The Duke of York’s Trowsers Made in a Fever Room.’ Chenoune is a French fashion journalist whose book was supported by the ...”

“... All over the world, postgraduate students of English who might once have written on Wordsworth or Mrs Gaskell are now turning out theses on vampires, monsters, sado-masochism and mutilation. Most of this can be put down to Post-Modern faddishness, though vampires have a more venerable pedigree, as Richard Davenport-Hines notes in his agreeable romp through Gothic art from Salvator Rosa to Damien Hirst ...”

“... These books are both attempts, by oblique routes, to explain major events in English history: in one case the Civil War, and in the other the Reformation. That, however, is where the resemblance between them ends: for the rest, it would be hard to find a more extreme contrast in historical methods. Professor Underdown, as he makes clear in his preface, sees no virtue in attempts at explanation of the Civil War which concentrate on political events at the centre ...”

“... more dogmatic Marx, but rather as forming a Hegelian continuity with them. His reading of the English political economists made him pessimistic about the economic prospects of the working class. His reading of the French socialists, already begun in Cologne, led him to see the abolition of private property and the establishment of communal and collective ...”

“... shouldn’t have done that’; ‘she should have done this’ – and, for an English audience especially, it offers the nagging fascinations of class: we half-relish their snobbery and élitism, half-revel in the righteous disdain these provoke. All this is a matter of broad cultural psychology, and complaining about it is like carping at ...”

“... Ask what will transform literary research in the next ten years and a likely answer is The English Poetry Full-Text Database. This project, whose three serial instalments will be complete this summer, has reportedly clocked up almost a hundred sales. That may not seem a lot, until you multiply it by the unit price of £30,000 (£5000 cheaper if you got ...”

“... that as a woman of mature years I can now see her unenviable situation: an ordinary provincial English housewife in love with an ageing ‘cosmopolitan’ Lothario with whom she had nothing in common, except their equal desire for his material comfort in his later years, and in loco parentis to a furious, fucked-up teenager who despised everything she and ...”

“... In The Morris Book (1907), a work that did much to foster the 20th-century revival of interest in English folk dancing, Cecil Sharp both acknowledges and attempts to repress the hybrid, extra-national origins of the morris dance: The weight of the testimony must be held to show Morocco as the fount and origin, no matter if the genius of our own folk – so far removed from anything native to Africa – has, in the process of the centuries, altered it until it bears, in spirit, little resemblance to the parent stock ...”

“... worse has happened: an attempt in the best colonial tradition of demented heroism to codify the English common law in Chinese (something nobody has yet done in English) in time for the handover in 1997 has foundered on problems of translation. Initial worries about the Mandarin equivalent of issue estoppel and certiorari ...”

“... Europeans have made any impact, in the sense that their names are known and recognised. One is the English explorer Richard Burton, who arrived in 1855 and was probably the first European to enter this Muslim stronghold. The other is the nomadic French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who worked here as a trader in the 1880s, and who ...”

“... Free French allies. Churchill’s man with de Gaulle was Major General Edward Louis Spears, half-English, half-Irish by birth, French by upbringing and education, a career British cavalryman whose two languages (he had also qualified as an Army Interpreter in German), courage (four times wounded) and temperament had made him a name as a front-line liaison ...”

“... Howell and Ford had a further stroke of luck in their discovery of the unpublished memoirs of the English showman who first exhibited him. Tom Norman, it turns out, was something of a magnate in these lower depths of the trade: he had more than a dozen freak and waxwork shows moving from one grimy location to another in greater London. Within four ...”

“... We shall know more about the origins of the English Civil War when we know more about English Puritans. This seems, on the face of it, an absurd proposition. From S.R. Gardiner’s confident description of the Great Rebellion as ‘the Puritan Revolution’ downwards, we have not lacked studies which linked Protestant religious attitudes to the coming of the Civil War ...”