“... and afford established authority and tradition an exaggerated respect.’ Well, followers of George Davie and his vision of the ‘democratic intellect’ in Scottish education might dispute Smout’s emphases while necessarily admitting many of his facts. Readers of certain recent Scottish fiction and poetry, on the other hand, will find the image of ...”

“... equal ‘Jacksonian’ hostility to the ‘parasitical’, shiftless, lazy, drunken (or addicted) urban proletariat, above all those of alien or immigrant origin. Anti-intellectualism has also always been at the heart of this strain of American life. Millenarian religion, still concentrated in the Southern and Midwestern Bible Belt, is suffused with ...”

“... did not dispel the rumours that, as a Republican governor anonymously remarked, ‘he’s like George W. Bush, but without the brains.’ When asked how old the earth is – a Creationist litmus test – Perry said he doesn’t have ‘any idea’: ‘I know it’s pretty old. So it goes back a long, long way.’ They could have picked Bobby Jindal, the ...”

“... years later, Landry, a character in La Petite Fadette, a novel written by Dupin under her pen name George Sand, thinks about drowning himself in the river. By this time Sand’s readers would have been familiar with the suicide option. In her first novel, Indiana (1832), a serving girl drowns herself in a millpond while her mistress, the eponymous heroine, is ...”

“... of shooting, to take up work on Gone with the Wind, after that film’s original director, George Cukor, who preceded Fleming on Oz, had left. Vidor replaced Fleming. (The first director on Oz was Richard Thorpe.) Rushdie’s argument becomes somewhat confused on the question of auteur credit. He makes much of geometric and other compositional details ...”

“... and their sense of history. The burgh, the town which is – or was – self-governing as a tiny urban unit and at the same time closely linked to the farming and crofting world of its hinterland, is in many ways the real locus of Scottish history, and also of Scottish imagining and writing. Most fiction which is not patrician in authorship takes the ...”

“... lavish civic restorations and the corresponding honeypots of hedonistic-bohemian living. It’s an urban spectacle unlike any other I have seen in Britain, fuelled by universities, football and foreign property investors, a post-industrial peacocking that makes you gawp. Burnham was engaging, oddly shy, full of seemingly genuine energy to do more as ...”

“... for McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside ...”

“... with Republicans dominant in the conservative heartland but enjoying less appeal on the urban coastline. On closer inspection, the Republicans lose none of their menace, but they also provoke a degree of puzzlement, as much on the right as on the left. In The Right Nation, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two centre-right journalists who ...”

“... The savagery imagined to be out there at the margins of empire had in fact turned out to be an urban European pastime. Via Hearn and Seabrook, the zombie started to appear in the pulp magazines dedicated to horror, unease and thrills. Though the zombies’ heritage may derive from the Caribbean, they have certainly long since ‘gone global’: the film ...”

“... for New Yorkers: an empathic connection was forged with many families of the victims, and Governor George Pataki, perhaps the biggest fish in this particular pond (he controlled the selection of the LMDC), also swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. Eventually, two finalists were announced: Libeskind and Think (Viñoly, Frederick Schwartz, Ken Smith and Shigeru ...”

“... Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, 1985); Adonis Clothed (2000 BC silver statuette from Aleppo to George Clooney, 2002); Portraits of Adonis (bronze head of Sargon from Akkad 2500-2000 BC to Denis Rodman c.1998 – no, I don’t know who he is either). In the pages that followed, Eco found an array of pictures to please, excite and rest the eye, and gave a ...”

“... to its website, Love Saves the Day is ‘an integrated, licensed, food and grocery store for urban living’. It has a mostly glass façade, and two different logos, and packages its goods with almost fetishistic attention. One brand of coffee comes in a metallic silver bag, with the following information printed down one side in varying sizes, colours ...”

“... British imperial superiors, even – Scott Anderson suggests – to the point of treason. (When George V tried to decorate him after the war, he handed all the medals back on the spot.) He was also very much against European cultural imperialism, genuinely – so far as we can tell – preferring ‘Eastern’ ways. (Certain Eastern ways, that is: he had a ...”

“... of it, literary biography is a pretty odd genre. Like gossip and newspapers, it is an essential urban discourse; like most English novels, it is short on plot and long on social nuance apparently irrelevant to the story. Solidity of specification is the thing. Henry Harland was less taken with California Novelist Gertrude Atherton, who was ...”