“... about that: he said the fondness for clans was a consequence of a Southern addiction to Walter Scott. He was only half-joking when he said that Scott’s heroic clans, and their readiness for battle, were responsible for the Civil War. Unlike the Hunts, the Bushes have never had their tycoon, although several have tried ...”

“... John Clearwater, the tormented mathematician in William Boyd’s novel Brazzaville Beach, wants to reduce chaos, flux and turbulence to an elegant set of equations. He’s also an obsessive moviegoer who refuses to watch anything which doesn’t meet his one absolute criterion: ‘he believed, with a fundamental zeal, that a true film, a film that was true to the nature of its own form, had to have a happy ending ...”

“... he had built. Wal-Mart continued its expansion after his death in 1992; its current chairman, Lee Scott, has headed the firm since 2000. At the time of writing the Walton family share of Wal-Mart is worth $102 billion. (The 2004 Bush tax cut benefited the family to the tune of $91,500 per hour.) Wal-Mart is the biggest company in the world. It has two million ...”

“... Sir John Junor made his reputation mainly as the man prepared to be more bitchy about famous people than any other newspaper columnist. This was the basis on which he conducted his column on the Sunday Express, the paper he also edited for 32 years, and which underpins its less successful appearance nowadays in the Mail on Sunday ...”

“... is now in the library founded by a rather more public-spirited buccaneer of book collecting, John Pierpont Morgan). Paul Meyer’s career was a model of all that is best in academic rigour; he later helped analyse the documents which led to the acquittal of Alfred Dreyfus. The History of William Marshal contains nearly twenty thousand lines of ...”

“... Nation, Mew was summoned to a series of poetry readings given by the culturally avid Mrs Dawson Scott, who later founded International PEN. ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ treats the case of a man inflamed with desire for his young wife, a wild little fay who runs away from him and is recaptured and incarcerated in her own house. It is remarkable for giving ...”

“... on her work as worthy of parody – not just recognisable, but recognised. When Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare secured her a civil list pension in 1923, Mew couldn’t decide whether it was more ‘like a dream or a nightmare’. Such diffidence also contained defiance. Her public readings were bracing affairs – ‘like having ...”

“... who was tried for his role in the botched shooting of his blackmailer and former lover, Norman Scott. The press had long protected Thorpe – Grant describes him as the ‘beneficiary of a culture of journalistic restraint towards the powerful’ – but once he was acquitted, the floodgates opened, and there was a story-buying spree. After reporters ...”

“... and educated by her mother, she was ‘a keen, precocious and eclectic reader’ of Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray and Wilkie Collins, but modelled her first literary efforts ‘chiefly upon Jane Eyre’ and believed that Charlotte Brontë was the most passionate Victorian novelist. Braddon also enjoyed the popular fiction in penny ...”

“... therefore assume that it had been there on the Thursday. But when the local landowner, Mr Ian Scott, went around counting his trees with a view to felling on 22 March, he didn’t come across any bodies. Corpses do not turn up in different locations, after rigor mortis has set in, of their own volition. The events surrounding the ‘brutal and callous ...”

“... items – the Mauser, the Ortgies and others. I also have a tiny, century-old Webley & Scott vest-pocket .25 calibre pistol and a 9 mm German Luger from the First World War, all of them still shootable. Some of these guns I picked up at gun shows in the American South, where in a private sale it’s possible to buy any gun without papers or ...”

“... an important part of a concerted exercise in public persuasion. The same artist’s paintings of John Simpson’s ideas of how Paternoster Square would look if the latest Palladians were given control were a highly successful spoiling exercise which came very close to making people believe it was a real alternative to Arup Associates’ official scheme. An ...”

“... John Smith was ‘one of them’. Tony Blair is ‘one of them’. And so are Chris Smith and Jack Straw and half the Shadow Cabinet and many more on the backbenches including Frank Field, that one-man think-tank of the Labour Right. ‘They’ are the Christian socialists, architects of New Labour, ready to provide the movement with the ethical foundations which seem sorely missing ...”

“... for a more discriminating understanding of the texts. Both taught and published in America. John Unrau and Jeanne Clegg have enabled us to see Ruskin’s relations with Venice in a new light: one works in Canada, the other in Italy. Important collections of correspondence (Bradley’s editions of the letters from Venice and the Cowper-Temple ...”

“... crowd of the Twenties and Thirties, matching the literary hard drinking of the writers around Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Actors were even encouraged in their cups by movie fans. According to the pioneer producer J. Stuart Blackton, ‘Prohibition ... brought about the unique situation of reminiscent and heartfelt applause from the audience whenever a ...”