“... Now is the time of schism.I grew up in the Free Church of Scotland. I knew it as a community of urban Highlanders with Calvinist theology and socially conservative politics in which everyone knew everyone, not just at the congregational level but across the country. It was its own world and only an anthropologist’s kinship chart could capture the full web ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and subtlety the equal at least of those other celebrated Ford Lectures, Richard Pares’s King George III and the Politicians. Professor Gash has yet to be honoured by a festschrift. But Edward Arnold have done him proud and served readers better by inviting him to publish this collection of pieces old and new, 15 essays and articles in all, of which seven ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... celebrities; a fat man has ‘Pavarottian girth’; another, a good-looking Muslim, ‘resembled George Clooney with darker skin and a neatly trimmed beard’. Pointing out these lines, I feel like the mayor’s aide, ‘a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it’. The soft brown spots ...”

“... 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 ...”