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“... Bellow, his then wife Sondra, and Sondra’s lover Jack Ludwig, also a member of the Bard English Department. Mustn’t there be, it was suggested, some ‘homosexual component’ – Atlas probably wants to say ‘homosocial’ – in the relationship between the two men? To explain this sort of arrangement, he might relevantly have mentioned a few ...”

“... of seriousness. It has been raised from the level of nostalgia and trivia by four new biographies: Richard Koszarski’s Erich von Stroheim, Roger Icart’s Abel Gance (in French – still searching for an English publisher), Richard Schickel’s D. W. Griffith and now David Robinson’s ...”

“... a quite important civil servant with good connections to power, and from a family almost typically English in its concentration not on literary matters but on moving up the social scale. Chaucer’s great-grandfather, Andrew ‘le Taverner’, thus seems to have kept a pub in Ipswich, while his great-great-grandson, ...”

“... Richard Cobb, who died last year at the age of 79, began his career as a historian of Revolutionary France. When I first met him, in 1968, he was widely thought to be able to write only in French, but as time went on a strong personal vein and a taste for high comedy widened the scope of his writing and revealed a highly distinctive English style: intricate perceptions and sensations set down in long, baroque sentences, full of Gallicisms, argot and incantatory lists of French and English place-names ...”

“... of’). In some cases, though words are used in a way that is wildly at variance with any known English usage, one can hazard a guess at the intended meaning: if you read ‘projected’ for ‘pivoted’, ‘exemplars’ for ‘pawns’, ‘rejected’ (or possibly ‘parodied’) for ‘parroted’, ‘influential’ for ‘inferential’, then at least ...”

“... recommended it to Harvard University Press, along with the suggestion that Aaron, of the Harvard English Department, be invited to do the job. It took seven years, and involved the reduction of the 17 million words to less than one-tenth and of a thousand ‘characters’ to about forty-five. Very late in life, and then only reluctantly, Inman faced the fact ...”

“... mind it. They don’t to this day, and Churchill’s speeches are praised for their mastery of the English language. However, it is certainly not my view that the way in which Semites and Anti-Semites has been organised reflects a purely compositional decision, which can be assessed by weighing up gains in coherence against losses in effectiveness. On the ...”

“... wanted them to stay. The planners came up against popular opinion, and lost. ‘The well-known English capacity for compromise will triumph,’ one planner gloomily forecast, ‘and we shall get a modern city dressed in “medieval” trappings: a city with a modernised street system incongruously lined with mock “medieval” façades. There can be no ...”

“... Germany before the First World War, and read and spoke German; he had also visited England and met English economic historians; and he was the author of a major, synoptic analysis of Feudal Society, first published in 1939 and finally translated into English in 1961, as well as a study of the ‘royal touch’ believed to ...”

“... suddenly found themselves denounced by their students. A decent liberal anthropologist called Richard Newbold Adams, the doyen of US Guatemalan studies at the time and a distinguished professor at Austin, Texas, had worked in the rural areas in the Fifties and wrote a US Government-funded study entitled Receptivity to Communist-Fomented Agitation in Rural ...”

“... Philip concluded that ‘the mass of evil brought upon the wretched Bushmen is greater under the English Government than under the Dutch.’ Similar attitudes were evident among the British dealing with the Aborigines and the Maoris. ‘How would I civilise the Maoris?’ asked Captain John Guard, a former convict whose ship was wrecked off the North Island ...”

“... rather than as a cracked oracle. Up to now, the texts of his prophecies have been available to English readers only in editions whose principal purpose is to demonstrate their predictive power, often through quatrain-by-quatrain explication. Now, a vigorous, wry, alert new translation by Richard Sieburth offers ...”

“... Cities that are beautiful, safe and equitable are within our grasp.’ So says Richard Rogers at the end of this reworking of his Reith Lectures of 1995, and we must do our best to believe him. Suppose, however, that the lecturer had pronounced instead on another of the basic building-blocks of society – the family, for instance ...”

“... it appears in the same author’s History of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (now available in English translation). But in the main this is an approachable and thought-provoking book for anyone with an interest in and some knowledge of the Crusades. The essential problem of the kingdom of Jerusalem and the lesser principalities of ‘Outremer’ was a ...”

“... work of academics. One such man is Ian Buruma. Educated in the Netherlands but writing in English, Buruma is known for his work on the Far Eastern Economic Review and in the New York Times, and as the author of A Japanese Mirror, a racy book on the Japanese underworld. God’s Dust, too, is somewhat breathlessly written as he moves us from Burma to ...”