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“... essay on ‘Upon the Horrid Plot’ shows that he explains all the proverbs in the poem, while Ross and Woolley keep telling you that a particular phrase is indeed proverbial and that you can find out what it means by consulting the Oxford Dictionary of English ...”

“... Together with the splendid book in the same series devoted to Swift (edited by David Woolley and Angus Ross), this work floats easily above all rivals. The choice of contents is fresh and ingenious, showing off aspects of Johnson which critics commonly underestimate. The poetry includes bilingual texts of poignant Latin works. The early prose includes ...”

“... Nose (1996) – both edited by Alec Finlay – and Collected Poems and Songs, edited by Raymond Ross. All three books reveal Henderson, by then in his seventies and eighties, as he chose to be revealed. His only other publications had been fifty years earlier: Ballads of World War Two, collected and sometimes also written by himself, in 1947, and Elegies ...”

“... One of these books is very long and the other is very short. Each in its own way is a wonderful piece of work. They stand at opposite ends of the century that runs from the 1740s to the 1840s, but they may be thought to bear each other out, in ways which affect an understanding of the family life of that time, and of its incorporation in the literature of Romanticism – that part of it, in particular, which is premised on conceptions of the divided or multiple self and can be referred to as the literature of romantic duality ...”

“... and middle-aged, middle-class anxieties with the nine stories in Georgina Hammick’s Spoilt. Angus Wilson’s name has been mentioned in comparison, but these pieces have none of the acidity and satiric hardness of Wilson’s early short stories. Their sheen, style and deliberate under-statement are much nearer the New Yorker tadition. In these tales ...”

“... giddier flights, of which she might have discovered something by interviewing, say, Donald Carne-Ross, are largely ignored. P.H. Newby, under whose patient aegis many splendid irregularities were committed, appears here, as no doubt he preferred, in the guise of a quietly embattled bureaucrat, with no indication that he was in his exiguous spare time a very ...”

“... help. But in the 1950s his unsentimental prose was widely admired – especially in Britain. Angus Wilson, Julian Maclaren-Ross and Francis Wyndham all praised him, as did Elizabeth Bowen, who described In Love as a ‘little masterpiece’. One by one his books fell out of print, until the reissue last year of In ...”

“... Wheatley, of Housing Act fame, was the only creative minister of the 1923-4 Government. But Willie Ross, Wilson’s Scottish Secretary, hardly gets a mention in Ponting’s book. His most important Labour forerunner in the Scottish Office, Tom Johnston, who held the post during the Second World War, lived down his Red Clyde past to become a man above ...”

“... bringing us to Aberdeen after long stravaigs from Vatersay north to Lewis, through Easter Ross to Caithness, Rousay in Orkney, Yell and Unst in Shetland, searching for people whose forebears were evicted one hundred and fifty years ago. On the hill slope to southward I look out as usual for the four black pinnacles on the tower of the church where my ...”

“... is happening because she’s a Christian or an evangelical or a woman. Ian Blackford, the MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, who was leader of the SNP in the House of Commons until last year, is also a Free Church member. Why didn’t his religious beliefs warrant the same attention? The reason is that Blackford’s voting record and political positions on ...”

“... the present constitutional structure of the United Kingdom is probably the one that works best. Ross McKibbin The​ early Scottish referendum results didn’t look good for the would-be dividers of the kingdom. My pro-independence Orcadian friend, down in London for a wine fair, went to bed before 3 a.m., disconsolate, not long after a furious thunderstorm ...”

“... way. Out of this realisation came his interest in such non-cowardly homosexuals as T.E. Lawrence (Ross) and Alexander the Great (Adventure Story). But perhaps the question to be asked is: why should a heterosexual writer adopt a gay point of view? What’s the benefit, not to the person, but to the novel? There needs to be some novelistic payoff, if we accept ...”

“... and he once told me the beach at Brighton, this would be in the 1950s, was covered with copies of Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After.’ Wilson’s novel, pretty much forgotten now, tells the story of a writer called Bernard Sands who is married but homosexual and ends up living next door to a woman, Mrs Curry, who procures children for paedophiles. The book ...”