1.  In English studies especially the modern and the early modern have been erroneously conflated.

2.  A Russian friend, educated in St Petersburg, said that the staples of her English studies were Great Expectations, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Vanity Fair.

3.  Both were essayists rather than scholars, belonging to an age before English studies had accumulated its own technical machinery; so that their freedom to polemicise about past centuries now looks, in retrospect, like a liberty lost.

4.  The mechanisms through which a cultural and institutional identity for English studies was established were forged within a wider social movement which developed between the 1880s and the 1920s.

5.  This new cultural leadership was articulated in terms of a spiritual character or aura which would elicit consent on the part of the governed and was of immense influence for the early development of the institutionalized discipline of English studies.

6.  Equally the Report has been read as revealing the essential features of English studies as a discipline.

7.  In the context of the history of English studies, the Report can best be understood as an attempt to develop a strategy which would effectively link state concerns with those of a wider movement within civil society.

8.  It may be that responses from within the universities were shaped as much by an unwillingness to accept a national role for the universities, as -by the Report's unprecedented prioritization of English studies.

9.  In consequence, the identity of English studies during the inter-war period was forged, not out of the discourses of the Newbolt Report, but rather in terms of the subject's consolidation as an autonomous academic discipline and learned profession.

10.  The major development during the inter-war period was the establishment of English studies as a bulwark against, rather than force for social change and cultural innovation.