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“... a conscious programme to fill a cultural vacuum. Lessing and Herder consciously played the part of John the Baptist, and Herder, for one, recognised in Goethe the fulfilment of the prophecy. But the picture is not quite so clear and simple as this may suggest. If Reed is right to associate Classicism with ‘ideas of literary status and authority’, ‘ages ...”

“... like this: ‘Well, who do you think ordered Castro’s assassination – the office boy? It was John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby.’ The CIA has no will of its own, and merely serves the President, so if it was trying to kill Castro then Kennedy must have ordered it. More generally, the evil that the CIA does is no more than the evil of presidents. The ...”

“... seem to her out of proportion – by Lona Mosk Packer (obsessed with the idea that William Bell Scott was Christina’s lover), Maureen Duffy (engrossed in the phallic symbolism of ‘The Goblin Market’), Maurice Bowra, Virginia Woolf. She has, of course, her own explanation. She sees Christina as a warm-blooded Italian conforming through strength of will ...”

“... might serve as useful allies in the Crusades. This belief was reinforced by the legend of Prester John, which held that there was a powerful Christian monarch somewhere in the East, whose overriding ambition was to liberate the Holy Sepulchre from the infidels. Further support for the story came from a fictitious letter suggesting that a mysterious and ...”

“... it had published which described Jesus having sex with a variety of men, including Pontius Pilate. John Mortimer and Geoffrey Robertson appeared for the defence, but lost. Gay News was fined and its publisher given a suspended prison sentence. ‘I have an open mind about queer-bashing,’ Waugh’s diary reflected, ‘from one point of view it seems rather ...”

“... is pitching it a bit strong. Certainly Chenoune has read his Chateaubriand and his Proust, his Scott Fitzgerald and his Ernest Hemingway, as well as the Tailor and Cutter and Journal des Tailleurs; he has studied a history of the Hawaiian shirt and he knows where to put his hand on the fanzine called Sniffin’ Glue. His objective approach is praised in a ...”

“... only son, Malcolm, born on the bonny banks of Lochranza, the beauty of which inspired Sir Walter Scott to the curmudgeonly reflection that ‘wake where’er he may, man wakes to care and toil.’ So it proved with the Macmillans. Malcolm prospered though hard work on his poor land, becoming a tacks man, a kulak among crofters, who served as an elder of the ...”

“... has made this book so enticing. It was inevitable, given his background, that he would be drawn to Scott Fitzgerald, the novelist for whom Hollywood was the nemesis he needed. You understand that, no matter the phantom of success and splendour that Fitzgerald endured, his destiny was the swimming pool that awaits Gatsby, or the vanishing of Dick Diver at the ...”

“... was threatening to withhold his work from the Oxford Book of Scottish Verse if its editor, Tom Scott, included anything by Finlay. To Finlay, Scott was an ‘arrogant big redhaired idiot’ and ‘foul monster’, while to MacDiarmid Poor. Old. Tired. Horse was ‘utterly vicious’ and Finlay a ‘teddyboy’. These ...”

“... the first thing that fails to surface even in the best translation. A la Recherche can be funny in Scott Moncrieff’s Bloomsbury accents, funnier still in the admirable version of Terence Kilmartin, and yet Proust’s own peculiar feeling for human comedy cannot in the end be divorced from language. Charlus’s mixture of preciousness and pomposity emerges in ...”

“... ever sceptical Henry James – were fascinated by Crane’s besoin de la fatalité, his air, which Scott Fitzgerald was to hit off so well in The Great Gatsby, of needing to fulfil a personal myth and become the man he had dreamed of. Lord Jim and Gatsby are doomed by the plot they invent for themselves: Crane’s own tale was ironically haunted by just the ...”

“... and religion, plunge into a world of stale opinions regarding, say, the merits of Sir Walter Scott – how he brings history alive! – or Flaubert’s close friend George Sand, with her ‘fine adulteries and noble lovers’. (Pécuchet is even smitten by Sand’s socialism, and her bénisseuse or benevolent side, which Flaubert, truly fond of her ...”

“... aqueduct in Britain: the oldest, highest and longest. ‘The stream in the sky’, as Walter Scott called it, at Pontcysyllte on the Llangollen Canal, is also attributed to Telford, though with the active collaboration of the more senior engineer William Jessop and the ironmaster William Hazledine. It consists of an iron trough supported on arched iron ...”

“... Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side of idolatry. Such writers and editors do the work he wants to help with – they keep going some intelligent conversation about ...”

“... seemed just a little less febrile, she could have passed in the outside world for vivacious. ‘John,’ I said, noticing how dull my voice sounded – and I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘John,’ she repeated, smiling. She gave me a long, appraising look. ‘So. What are you in ...”