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“... July 1957, the young Lord Altrincham wrote an article ‘The Monarchy Today’ in the National and English Review, a journal he owned. It is doubtful whether any other editor in the country would have touched the thing. Altrincham called the Queen ‘a pain in the neck’, ridiculed her fatuous ‘my husband and I’ locution, and alleged that she was the ...”

“... range of the merest extra, was greeted with the sort of rapturously whooping applause for which an English stage actor would have had to wait all night, if not his whole career. Washington made a very good Brutus – another in the line of nobly unassuming popular heroes he has played in Hollywood for years – and since I was putting together a book of essays ...”

“... Everybody agrees mat the British, and especially the English, are suffering from an identity crisis. The standard explanation is loss of Empire and failure to find an alternative role. And yet in many ways it was the Empire which sowed the seeds of our present uncertainties. Until about 1800 the lineaments of national self-identity were fairly clear, but during the 19th century what it was to be British or English became a far more contested question ...”

“... Conrad, Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford, is convinced that a similar destiny was in store for the English writers of the 19th and 20th centuries who ‘imagined’ America during their visits to it. They imagined it not freely but in obedience to various pre-existent notions both about the continent and about themselves. The imaginative metamorphoses of ...”

“... makes it clear beyond doubt that Burke belonged, not to this ethnic-political entity, the ‘New English’, but to the ‘Old English’, of Anglo-Norman descent like the family names of Burke, Nagle and Nugent, and historically Catholic. His family were converts to the Church of Ireland, much like the conversos or ‘New ...”

“... Many people firmly believe there was. We owe the widespread belief that Robin lived in the time of Richard I (1157-1199) to William Stukeley (1687-1765), an eccentric scholar of ancient British history who fabricated for him a crazy family pedigree going back to the Normans. Knight argues that the search for the historical Robin is as quixotic as the search ...”

“... survey of a ‘tradition of thought’, a ‘mode of feeling’, which Fred Inglis identifies as English and, in a vague sense, socialist. The tradition is characterised by ‘a habit of recourse to concrete examples in argument, a calm refusal of formal metaphysics, an unexamined criticism of “over-abstraction” (which means other people’s ...”

“... philosophy, too, was dead. After Russell, he was the last person who could, at any rate within the English-speaking world, make philosophy accessible to a general audience: from now onwards, it has condemned itself to be a hermetic subject. Today England seems to me so fundamentally backward-looking in its attitudes that it cannot celebrate any event unless it ...”

“... of Advanced Study in Princeton. There Heidegger spends two years slowly and painfully learning English, aching for the chance once again to spellbind seminar rooms full of worshipfully attentive students. He gets a chance to do so in 1937 when some of his fellow émigrés arrange a permanent job for him at the University of Chicago. There he meets ...”

“... discover during their visit.Discovering and presenting to the public new knowledge about the English country house is an admirable way for the National Trust to deepen and broaden appreciation of the complex histories of the buildings in its care. But the project has attracted fierce criticism from Conservative politicians and journalists who clearly ...”

“... His chance to shine lures him away from his sound business and his devoted Irish wife, into an English marriage, a contract with the BBC, and two decades of the fame for which he insatiably hungers, as a folk-hero who puts down the mighty and is adoringly recognised in the street. When his English wife dies, she provides ...”

“... whose retellings of native ghost stories have made him more famous in Japanese translation than in English. The most interesting writing has been in sketches by those who have passed by and peered in without ever achieving intimacy with the culture: Angela Carter’s essays of the early 1970s collected in Nothing Sacred; Anthony Thwaite’s delicate and ...”

“... already the author of his major works. The Foundation nonetheless took a big punt on the genius of Richard Powers, who was awarded his MacArthur in 1989, aged only 32. I haven’t checked, but he is probably the youngest novelist ever to win a fellowship. Generally unknown in 1989, and temperamentally reticent, he has lately divulged something of his personal ...”

“... counsellor and a bureaucrat of the old school. Henry had remained loyal to Henry Tudor throughout Richard III’s reign, despite starvation and torture; despite, according to legend, being interrogated by Richard himself. ‘Thou servest for moonshine in the water a beggarly fugitive,’ ...”

“... Buddensieg, Wyclif was ‘the first to do battle for the maintenance of evangelical faith and English freedom’. Not even the scholarly Workman could escape the myth. For this unabashed admirer, Wyclif was a man born ahead of his time, ‘harbinger of a premature spring’. Did McFarlane escape? His title might suggest not: John Wycliffe and the ...”