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“... of a man regarded as one of the most unreal, isolated and timeless figures of the Victorian era. Richard Burton arrived in the Adriatic port in 1873 as Britain’s consul. He had pretty much seen everything. He had visited sacred centres from Benares to Salt Lake City, with a pilgrimage to Mecca in between; he had trekked thousands of miles into central ...”

“... has been as timber, raw material for crafts, and fuel. The idea that there is something specially English about our hedgerows turns out to be another myth, nor is it true that these all date from only two centuries ago. The latter is a particularly pernicious notion, for it has lulled civil servants into condoning the philistinism of contemporary farmers, the ...”

“... but on Joyce’s work as a whole, he is vigorously interesting and helpful. The body-language of Richard Brown’s book is far more specific than Parrinder’s, but his assumptions are much the same. He has two aims in mind. ‘One tries to place Joyce’s work in the context of ideas in which he participated.’ The ideas in view are mainly connected with ...”

“... of heat, sound and fury. This style of writing was the sole (and rather measly) contribution to English letters made by Kingsley Martin, and has been imitated by successive New Statesman columnists – Richard Crossman, Paul Johnson, Gerald Kaufman, Matthew Coady et al. (One only has to listen to the Parliamentary ...”

“... Whatshisname. The Hardy that we have at the end of the volume is a prosperous, middle-aged English Man of Letters, someone who might have written the works of, say, Edmund Gosse, or Walter Besant. But a career is not a life. There was another private story in those earlier years – of a failed marriage and an unhappy wife, of childlessness and ...”

“... is concerned to argue something more specific. He claims that the British, and more precisely the English, brought a peculiar commitment to the doctrine of progress and thereby played a unique part in installing it as the pre-eminent value of the West. Whether this is entirely fair to the French is a very moot point. Whether, in any event, it is cause for ...”

“... been a welcome respite from the familiar realities of wind and rain. In the earliest literature in English it is usually cold, as most people presumably were; but here too, detailed descriptions are rare. The ice and the storms are either given as facts, or personified. Gods and frost giants control temperature and wind speed. Even Chaucer, Harris laments, has ...”

“... characters sit together comfortably in Peele. Here, and not only with respect to this play, The English Romance in Time raises more questions than it can possibly answer. That is understandable. Cooper attempts to distinguish fairy tale from romance on the grounds that the former is driven by ‘magic’ whereas the latter subordinates it, giving its ...”

“... have been major investigations in Scotland (the Calman Commission of 2007-8) and Wales – the Richard Commission (2002-4), the Holtham Commission (2007-10) and the Silk Commission (2011-14) – into the broader operation of devolution and the funding mechanisms that support it. Anxiety has focused not only on relations between Westminster and the ...”

“... R. Ford, President of the United States . . . do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offences against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974. Nixon himself had ...”

“... within conventional accounts of 17th-century political motive and conduct. From the 1570s, English advocates of a Protestant foreign policy had applauded the Netherlanders’ struggle for independence from Spain and viewed them as necessary allies against the international Catholic menace. In the 1640s, the Parliament which fought against Charles I ...”

“... It was one thing for a North Berwick-born philosopher to refute the medieval legend which derived English claims to rule in Scotland from the overlordship of a Trojan called Brut; it was another for him to challenge the myth which traced Scottish independence back to an ancient Greek prince called Gathelus. Defeated at the Battle of Flodden, and fearful of ...”

“... cure deafness, produce a spinach pudding and restore your ailing horse. Gervase Markham’s The English Huswife (1615) covers ‘Physicke, Cookery, Banquetting-stuffe, Distillation, Perfumes, Wooll, Hemp, Flaxe, Dairies, Brewing, Baking and all other things belonging to an Household’. Manuscript collections often add in poems, notes of family ...”

“... women who were to become, or beginning to be, what the Germans call prominente. Among them were Richard Crossman, A.L. Rowse, Maurice Bowra, Isaiah Berlin, David Astor and the journalist Shiela Grant Duff, who, in 1982, published a book about their relationship, and followed it up with a volume of their correspondence. At opposite ends of the political ...”

“... it seemed, was the misguidedness, stupidity and sometimes dangerousness of religious belief. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens: over the previous few years each had published a bestselling book condemning religion, and they were all rather pleased with themselves. Dawkins’s The God Delusion alone, with its compelling ...”