“... Who would have thought it? Little Women is on the American bestseller list again, with the name ‘Winona Ryder’ over the title instead of Louisa May Alcott, as if she had written the book. But maybe Ryder deserves top billing, for pulling people into the movies to see Alcott’s March sisters updated for the Nineties ...”

“... success of The Vision of Salome, a titillating dance entertainment starring the voluptuous Maud Allan, herself an icon for homosexuals and a focus for stories of sexual debauchery that included manifold lesbian liaisons and affairs with the King and the Duke of Westminster. Such ‘degeneracy’ was too much for conservatives to swallow, and in the bleak ...”

“... has much to say about photography. There are moments when the text reads like a long letter to his little sister. He looks at a portrait of them as children, when he is seven and she four: ‘A little, a very little, sexual experimentation with my sister must probably date to about this ...”

“... and George Gershwin (Shall We Dance) as composers. There is some amazing dialogue (in this case by Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano – Allan Scott is credited on all three movies): ‘What are the grounds for divorce in New Jersey?’ ‘Marriage’; ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t know you well enough to tell you the ...”

“... Police, had been ‘oppressive’. With only circumstantial evidence left, the jury had little choice but to acquit. As the foreman delivered the verdict, the world tilted: for Sharon, for Heron, for the jurors. I can hear my distress thrumming through the piece I filed for the Journal. ‘As the foreman said “Not guilty,” Heron raised his eyes ...”

“... more and more into them. Rushdie infected the Indian novel with a similar disease. Novels like I. Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-nama, and Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel are driven by a frantic ambition to include within their pages all of India and all of its history. In Amit Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song, however, not much happens, although even this ...”

“... Bedsonia. Henry Bedson had been trained as a virologist by the doyen of British smallpox experts, Allan Downie of Liverpool University. Downie was the eighth son of a fisherman from Rosehearty in North-East Scotland. He had an identical twin, Ricky. Together they won all the prizes and ended up with identical marks when they qualified simultaneously with ...”

“... to all but the meanest citizens of the republic of letters, the novel is an obelisk for the late Allan Bloom, author of the 1987 shocker, The Closing of the American Mind. This book, which was a late product or blooming of the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought, argued that the American mind was closed because it had become so goddamned open ...”

“... domain’ is one of his examples. In his introduction to James Cochrane’s Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English (Icon, £6.99), Humphrys says that a young man who used the phrase ‘proactively networking’ when applying for a job at the BBC ought to have been ‘publicly executed’. So what should be done with whoever wrote the ...”

“... like, ‘Hoots, man – I dinna understand you sae weel now,’ and describes Theocritus as ‘the Allan Ramsay o’ Sicily’. One episode has the Shepherd galloping naked around Selkirkshire on an angry bull. When a new version of Hogg’s 1807 Memoir appeared in 1821, Blackwood’s carried a review so brutal (he is ‘the greatest boar on earth’; his ...”

“... islander Dara Ó Conaola, who dreamed he saw the fabled last island to the west, Arainn Bheag, Little Aran: ‘It was an island of two hills, with a tower at either end, and, he told me, it filled up that awful space to the south-west, giving him a feeling of security.’ Tim Robinson relates this, near the end of his double-work, Stones of ...”

“... told him that her husband ‘wrote an enormous amount of verse when they lived on Whalsay but little thereafter’ so that ‘much of the later work’ – this is Oxenhorn’s own comment – ‘was not written by an old man (such as the “later” Yeats), but some time before, by a poet in early middle age’. However the question of the ranking of ...”

“... dear for me.’ The 154 letters they exchanged – 80 published for the first time in George Allan Cate’s thoroughly introduced and annotated collection – shed agreeable light on the friendship of the two Victorian sages who strikingly resembled each other in some ways and yet in others were polar opposites. Both were of Scottish descent, but one was ...”

“... for instance), but in quite different contexts. It’s lovely to see how often Bishop began with little more than rhymes to structure a poem; ‘meddle model paddle’ is jotted at the top of a fragment called ‘Swan-Boat Ride’. There is also evidence throughout the notes of her interest in capturing the sound of idiomatic speech. In an entry from the ...”

“... about their potential consequences, and mostly vague recommendations regarding their reform. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, described on the New York Times best-seller list as ‘a critique of liberal arts education during the past twenty-five years’, has been widely considered as a distinguished part of this broad critical ...”