“... income, often felt they had to wait until they were better off. Some went ahead anyway. John Scott – a future lord chancellor, but in 1772 a 21-year-old Oxford student with vague plans to pursue a career in the church or at the bar – had no money to speak of and few prospects, and wasn’t at all the kind of son-in-law his sweetheart Elizabeth’s ...”

“... modest critical success and further novels followed: Barham Downs (1784), The Fair Syrian (1787), James Wallace (1788), Man as He Is (1792) and finally Hermsprong. Bage told Godwin that he believed ‘he should not have written novels, but for want of books to assist him in any other literary undertaking.’ Not that the reluctant novelist was uneducated. In ...”

“... and hunting trophies – were jam-packed in warehouses all over London. Burroughs Wellcome & Co, the business that paid for this magnificent trove of historical bric-à-brac, sold malt extract, cod liver oil, cocaine and other dietary supplements in the novel form of compressed tablets (their cocaine pills, labelled ‘Forced March’, were ‘to be ...”

“... It’s this kind of suggestive reticence that Eliot was reacting to when he remarked that Henry James had a mind so fine no idea could violate it. Along its outer border, the desire not to state ideas explicitly approaches the desire not to have them, as expressed by Flaubert’s ideal of a book about nothing. The obvious alternative to all this withholding ...”

“... will be curious to read the future story of this intricate Warre,’ the royalist pamphleteer James Howell wrote in 1644, ‘will find himself much stagger’d, and put to a kind of riddle.’ There is still no consensus on its name: is it the English Civil War or the Puritan Revolution or the British Civil Wars or the Wars of the Three ...”

“... Abbey, rising above the Solent like a displaced Malian mosque; and at Battersea: Giles Gilbert Scott’s immense power station, fought over for decades, not least by Stamp, was one of the great tokens of its age. Its twin, downriver at Bankside, was, of course, also saved. The Guinness Brewery at Park Royal was vandalised by Diageo with the sanction of the ...”

“... gathered outside.) The poem is Hood’s ‘Ode to The Great Unknown’, addressed to Sir Walter Scott. Why, Hood wonders, is Scott never to be seen, though his works are so widely read (‘Parent of many children – child of none!’)? At the end of nine intricately rhymed pages, Hood lightheartedly concludes that there ...”

“... speaking, Artiom is more reminiscent of a 19th-century British protagonist, a figure from Scott or Stevenson. He hurtles from peril to safety and back to peril again, guided by his sense of fairness. His admirers love Artiom for his lifefulness and the villains hate him for the same reason. An ex-policeman convict rescues him from log-hauling ...”

“... she later recorded it): ‘The best-dressed woman in New York.’ This is not the sort of ambition James Wood had in mind when he recently suggested in the LRB (4 January) that we owe half of English literature to the aspirant mother. Of course, those sensitive and ambitious women are usually the mothers of lower-class males; and in Wharton’s case, as in ...”

“... teaching on the new Black Studies programme, where the visiting speakers included Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney and James and Grace Lee Boggs.Cruse had been recruited in response to increasing discontent among Black students at the university. The publication of The Crisis ...”

“... mantras but proven facts of surviving dispossession. He calls her ‘Mom’ and has his friend Scott over to watch Monster Truck Madness on TV. She feels close to Du in ways it would be disloyal to Bud, with his naive faith in straightforwardness, to mention. Yet when Du’s teacher, Mr Skola, says, at a PTA meeting, ‘I tried a little Vietnamese on ...”

“... in particular has attracted many devotees and imitators, professionals and poetasters alike. Clive James’s flashy verse-letters in his book Fan-Mail (1977), for example, owe an obvious debt to Auden’s epistle. So do Charles Osborne’s self-advertising ‘Letter to W.H. Auden’ (‘The fact is that I’m writing a huge book/About you – it’s a kind of ...”

“... about from one clan grave to another while the present Stuart claimant to the throne, Michael James Alexander, was being interviewed by BBC Scotland. He is a gentle Belgian socialist who once worked as a waiter in Edinburgh but has taken up PR. ‘I felt it was important to attend,’ he told the cameras. ‘Ethnic cleansing was carried out after Culloden ...”

“... has got to – as witness particularly a quotation of several hundred words from Edwin Muir’s Scott and Scotland (1936), a text that many nationalists have thought the definitive sellout to the occupying power. (I think Muir’s text is more dated than he allows for, but it was brave of him to reprint it.) As for Dunn’s even-handedness, consider his ...”

“... of the prudes. But perhaps we will be expected to have come to terms by now with the Scots of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, noting that the proportion of obscene language seems to be even higher in demotic Scots than in demotic English, at any rate in novels. Somebody should look into this matter. The work ‘fuck’ and its derivatives were timidly ...”