“... along with self-government. Which is why Geddes – a recurrent presence in the novels of Alasdair Gray – counts as a patron of devolution, and indeed of that peaceable civic Europe in which Gray’s ‘Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Republic’ would find its place. The outcome has been rather different. The MSPs and the ...”

“... mock immodesty, ‘my bardship’. By this time bards were everywhere – in England too. Thomas Gray, a Cambridge don, wrote ‘The Bard’; William Collins, in London, hankered after the ‘Old Runic bards’ of the Highlands. More influentially, though, Edinburgh’s James Macpherson, after the smash-up of Culloden, produced his Fragments of Ancient ...”

“... an artistic recusant, joylessly exiled in the oppressive mainland kingdom. As his biographer Andrew Biswell – another AB! – puts it, ‘Burgess depicts Manchester before the Second World War as a Catholic city which is more Irish than English. His sentimental version of Lancashire is a place where the Reformation never really took hold. London and ...”

“... Studio and Piero della Francesca’s stately explorations of perspective’. Similarly, faced with Andrew Wyeth’s frequently nude sequence of Helga Testorf, Updike resists his inclination to the obvious. He notes Wyeth’s ‘glamorising touch’ and his bogus claims to be an abstractionist, then he caves in. But before he is prepared to admit that he ...”

“... most fervent champions, W.D. O’Connor, author of the first extended defence of Whitman, The Good Gray Poet (1866). And when Horace Traubel inquired, in 1888, about Whitman’s views on racial integration, he was dismayed to receive the following answer: ‘The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated: it is the law of history, races, what-not: always so ...”

“... The legend, essentially, is the one in Beatty’s fevered mind of a Faustian compact, a Dorian Gray-like perversion of human destiny. But Lillie was just trying to make the best of things under the circumstances: a perfectly human way to proceed, I should have thought. As for her soul – who’s to say? Lillie had the good fortune not just to be born ...”

“... Cowley, Shakespeare, Milton, James Thomson (‘the Elizabethian poets of glorious memory’), Gray, Cowper, Wordsworth and Bloomfield. To this list of influences could be added Burns, Allan Ramsay and James Beattie (Clare made much of his maternal grandfather’s Scottish heritage: ‘I would sooner be the Author of Tam o shanter then of the Iliad ...”

“... the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial precursor in grasping that bad publicity was useful – something to be actively sought, even fabricated. But he hadn’t featured so prominently in the coverage of his clients as McLaren ...”

“... House had been dictated by Roth’s Connecticut neighbour and flouncy nemesis Francine du Plessix Gray – ‘Francine Duplicitous Gray’, as Roth called her. Interviewing may not have been Miller’s forte but what was his forte? He made such a skimpy mess of the Notes on the Text for Volume Three of Roth’s Library of ...”

“... the eyes tired as he joked with his retinue. The beard had grown scruffy, heavily threaded with gray. ‘Visitors from abroad (and chiefly from the United States) ... Castro sees in astounding numbers and at astounding length,’ There is something of the assiduousness of the journalist about Castro, while his appetite for general conversation at late ...”

“... of course, not hers. Eva died in 1977 aged 91, after which the poems more or less stopped coming. Andrew Motion thinks this is no coincidence.Larkin pinpointed 63 as his probable departure date because that was when his father went, turned by his mother into ‘the sort of closed, reserved man who would die of some thing internal’. Sydney Larkin was the ...”

“... The Gregory clause was ‘a charter for land clearance and consolidation’, according to Peter Gray. ‘The substantial rise in evictions after 1847 was attributed largely to its introduction,’ according to Christine Kinealy. For the tenants whose potato crop had failed and whose families were starving, the Gregory clause was a nightmare. As a rule, not ...”

“... blighted her life and eventually transformed her – not entirely figuratively – into a Dorian Gray-style lesbian fright-bag. Heartbreakingly attractive in her youth (see the exquisite nude portraits made by her gay photographer friend Rolf Tietgens in the early 1940s), she looked like a sullen gargoyle by the time she died: rubbery, bloodshot, wrinkled to ...”

“... biographer, does emphasise that there is no documentary proof of the link, and both he and Andrew Lycett in his Life of Conan Doyle agree that this was ‘a brave act of solidarity on Willie’s part’. That’s an understatement. It was on the day of Oscar Hornung’s birth, 24 March 1895, that Frank Harris met Wilde at the Café Royal and advised ...”

“... into the major leagues of bestsellerdom and landed him on the cover of Time, his wheaty, squinty, Andrew Wyeth-esque head bearing solemn witness to ‘The Adulterous Society’. Prefaced with a quotation from Paul Tillich and with a high-gloss finish (‘his phallus sheer silver’ etc), Couples lent itself usefully to brow-furrowed editorial ponderings on ...”