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“... hates them all and is anguished with boredom. Then he comes across a reproduction of a portrait of Richard III and likes what he sees. ‘Someone too conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist … He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it.’ It’s a lot of romance to read into a medieval ...”

“... piece of philosophical writing. If one were asked which contemporary philosopher crafts the best English prose, Dennett would be one of the first to come to mind. Like The Concept of Mind, this book can be read with genuine pleasure by a non-philosopher; anyone who picks it up will be swept up in the excitement of Dennett’s project. Even a reader who has ...”

“... produce a ‘more or less continuous autobiographical narrative’ which, we are told, the editor Richard Pennington further abbreviated for publication. The first four years of this diary are dissolved into Mr Pennington’s Introduction, and Peterley Harvest, ‘the private diary of David Peterley now for the first time printed’, opened in June 1930 as ...”

“... illegally, prodigally, unconstitutionally and tyrannically’. When a party of English aristocrats was murdered by brigands at Dilessi in the 1870s, the British press had a field day, and the Athenian newspapers gave as good as they got. One proposed that Englishmen should be banned in perpetuity from the sacred soil of the ...”

“... in autumn? In some ways these lines show the Melville translation at its best: this is real English, moving easily and gracefully. But Lucretius included the metaphor, vital to the passage’s seductive tone, of autumn persuading the vines to pour forth their fruit, and the English version has obliterated it. Ronald ...”

“... that the impertinent reader soon longs for a hint of vanity. Can it be that a characteristically English snobbery still persists, seeking to minimise the contribution made by such a practical, working-class man as Smith? More likely, the reason for his neglect is that his great product – a geological map – came without any great book to go with it. And ...”

“... of the unrelenting imposition of middle-class conformism on the easier, opener attitudes of the English peasantry. ‘Earthy’ is the word we most often use of the way the peasants carried on. But listen to this: Upon Sunday the 18th and 25th days of this instant month of July, Thomas Odam with a white sheet upon his uppermost garment, and a white wand in ...”

“... Like his previous attempt at mixing 100 per cent proof world history with the small beer of English fiction (The Decline of the West, a title to rank with Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part II), News from Nowhere is a crashing failure. But it’s a monumental failure, a Spruce Goose or Centre Point of novels that will stand as something of a ...”

“... that he doesn’t want to read any more books that don’t begin: ‘A shot rang out.’ Richard Cobb’s second volume of autobiography, nominally about Shrewsbury and Oxford, opens with a man getting off the boat train at the Gare Saint-Lazare wielding (well, almost wielding) a blood-stained axe. The killer, an old schoolfriend of Cobb’s called ...”

“... get out of their comically arranged marriage. Is this because one of them is manifestly foreign to English and the other seems vaguely native? Etymology doesn’t help us much here. Ennui is French but it is related to annoy, and spree may come from Old Norse, or it may actually be French, an elision of esprit. The OED merely murmurs about the word’s ...”

“... him something of a rarity among academic literary critics of this or any other time. Literature in English began to be accredited as a course of study in English and American universities only in the early decades of this century, and since that time readers have been enjoined to treat literary style not as something to be ...”

“... unbidden from exile in July 1399 to claim his confiscated inheritance as Duke of Lancaster while Richard II was in Ireland, Henry Bolingbroke was greeted tumultuously as the prospective saviour of the realm. Richard, hurrying home, found himself deserted in mid-Wales and faced with no alternative to putting himself in his ...”

“... Richard Rogers’s new Lloyd’s building in London has begun business, to predictable complaints. A Guardian journalist asking for off-the-cuff comments from underwriters found them grumpy – the only appreciative voice was foreign and female. That is not surprising: the new Lloyd’s is an architectural statement of un-English vehemence ...”

“... of Time, a detective novel set entirely in a hospital bedroom, which is also an apologia for Richard III. Imagine my surprise when, in the tube from Heathrow, there came in and sat down opposite me a young and rather austere woman who was reading, with the appropriate detached bespectacled air, the latest of the Ricardian Society’s Bulletins. And she ...”

“... of Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae. The author of Andrea del Sarto would have found in Richard Strauss a subject ideally suited to his imaginative powers. He would have cast the composer, not, I think, in his early years, but towards the end of his life: in 1940, perhaps, in late summer. The scene: Strauss’s tastefully furnished study in his ...”