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“... novel, The Master and Margarita, written between 1928 and 1940 and now available in four different English translations, a character loses his head – literally. He slips on a Moscow street and is hit by a tram. His last thought is ‘Can this be?’ and his severed head then bounces away across the cobblestones. The question and the grisly performance of an ...”

“... of luminaries mostly patronised each other). When Sayre entered Harvard in the Fifties to study English, the New Criticism was in the ascendancy. ‘For us the arts were severed from society,’ she writes of her generation, ‘and I would have been astounded if I’d been asked to see a kinship between them.’ In ...”

“... comforts of hard power, some moments now look like straws in the wind. In late November 2010 the English FA sent David Cameron, Prince William and David Beckham to Fifa headquarters in Zurich to lobby on its behalf before the vote for the right to host the 2018 World Cup. Two old Etonians and an alumnus of Chingford County High School: the sight of these ...”

“... Isaac Babel said, ‘it would write like Tolstoy.’ The remark is quoted at the head of Richard Pevear’s introduction to this handsome new translation of War and Peace. I should like to think Babel meant that if the world was given to intricate thematic contrasts and parallels among its materials, to careful cross-cutting between city and ...”

“... of society is complete nonsense. He was the most upstanding, traditional upholder of everything English and everything Establishment.’ My own experience suggests otherwise. Long before I met him, Peter was intrigued and outraged at the hanging of James Hanratty for the 1961 A6 murder. When I took the case up in the late Sixties he bombarded me with ...”

“... also talks in sentences. With so much in the balance, not doing so is a minor sin, but can the English language survive another Bushwhacking? The difference between ‘peacemaker’ and ‘pacemaker’, a typical mangling of words on the campaign trail, is not ‘only’ a matter of language. Nor are the names of foreign countries and leaders. Apparently ...”

“... between 1918 and 1925, when they married, has been edited by a niece and a nephew, Polly Hill and Richard Keynes, who rightly believe that it will be ‘of value and interest and will not offend their ghosts’. In an excellent introduction they admit that Lydia, in the early stages, must have worn herself out in flattering Maynard. She had abandoned her ...”

“... but exhilaratingly willing to enjoy variety in landscape and in peoples. The best thing about Richard Jenkyns’s book is its readiness to shift critical attention away from Virgil’s politics towards his treatment of places and their relation to history. As he shows, place in Virgil is charged with emotion, with complex political affiliations, and with ...”

“... and defensive preface, written for the edition of 1972, she states her dissatisfaction with the English tradition and asserts that no 19th-century novel by an English writer could claim the same sort of success as that enjoyed by Stendhal and Tolstoy. George Eliot, she finds, is disqualified by her morality. Doris Lessing ...”

“... Hilliard describes in A Matter of Obscenity as ‘the most famous self-inflicted wound in English legal history’. There is plenty of competition for that distinction, starting with Oscar Wilde’s ‘Oh dear, no, he was a particularly plain boy.’ Griffith-Jones, who regularly advised the director of public prosecutions on possible obscenity ...”

“... In 1972 Auden had largely entrusted the selection of the pieces to Edward Mendelson, then a young English professor at Yale, thus launching him on a series of heroic editorial tasks which, 43 years later, is still not finished. As an editor, Mendelson is meticulous, judicious and quite extraordinarily thorough: in addition to tracking down all of Auden’s ...”

“... One might have called Hunter’s old-fashioned, were it not for the fact that bookshops in the English-speaking world had barely changed in two centuries. Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland, eagerly seeking the latest ‘horrid’ Mrs Radcliffe volumes in Bath, or Clarissa Dalloway, gazing disdainfully into Hatchard’s window in Piccadilly, would have ...”

“... the brutality of subjugation, but the relationship between rulers and ruled. In his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill took up the theme: ‘For nearly three hundred years Britain, reconciled to the Roman system, enjoyed in many respects the happiest, most comfortable and most enlightened times its inhabitants have had.’ More recently, it has ...”

“... runs he used to chat to his competitors, which some took for friendliness, others arrogance. Both Richard Askwith and Rick Broadbent have gone through the archives and spoken to those who knew Zátopek – particularly his wife, Dana, an Olympic gold-medal-winning javelin thrower – in order to tell his story in unprecedented detail. Zátopek was born in ...”

“... non-fiction intermingle outside the ambit of the novel. Francis Spufford is an almost parodically English figure whose output includes a cultural history of polar exploration (I May Be Some Time, 1996), a memoir of childhood reading (The Child that Books Built, 2002), a study of various unsung successes of postwar British science (Backroom Boys, 2003) and a ...”