“... have to contend with Lucas and Clement Graffe, Harvey Blacket, Bellamy James and his dog Anax, the Anderson women – Louise and her daughters Alethea (Aleph), Sophia (Sefton) and Moira (Moy) – Emil and Clive and the Adwardens. A reader alert to social differences will find such names far from neutral. An odour of class hangs about them. As emphatically as ...”

“... of funerals. The Isle of Dogs was bombed day in, day out. At the back of the house there was an Anderson shelter, a tinny prefab half-sunk into the ground and covered with earth. (The first citation in the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary is from the New Statesman, 3 June 1939: ‘Goats sheltered from high explosive in ...”

“... have led one to suspect: some of this is true, some of it questionable and the rest of it false. (Scott Lucas, by contrast, thinks almost all of it true.) Orwell was indeed unsociable, anti-feminist and homophobic, but only ambiguously anti-semitic, and by no means such a dewy-eyed idealiser of the plebs as some have imagined. Both Bowker and Taylor record ...”

“... as deep in the past as those files of the Spectator where he found the famous pieces by J.D. Scott and Anthony Hartley, or the scripts of John Wain’s Third Programme magazine First Reading, or copies of the Reading limited editions of Wain and Amis. Mr Morrison claims to have eschewed gossip and attended instead to such questions as: ‘Did the writers ...”

“... faced few direct challenges. Probably the most notorious was the wartime case of Liversidge v. Anderson, when all but one of the law lords abandoned any pretence of supervising executive action and held that ‘reasonable cause’ to suspect an individual of enemy associations meant any cause that seemed reasonable to the home secretary. The failure of the ...”

“... of the chapters, influencing its tone and content. They are Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Stephen Crane, Scott Fitzgerald, Conrad – and H.P. Lovecraft. The last-named crops up almost as a joke when Smiricky’s girlfriend buys some farcical ‘sex-aids’ at a ‘Lovecraft’ shop: he tells her to read H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories in much the same way he ...”

“... periodical, the New Age, and to meet Scottish intellectuals including the composer Francis George Scott (to whom Hugh MacDiarmid would dedicate A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle) and a French lecturer at Glasgow University called Denis Saurat (who is often credited with giving the 1920s Scottish literary renaissance its name). Most important, ‘in the early ...”

“... journalist, he could pursue the maxim laid down by those legendary figures of his paper, C.P. Scott and A.P. Wadsworth, who told their young men to stick to their stories. At a time when grasshoppering has become the journalistic norm, people on both sides of the Belgrano argument will talk to any journalist who has a corpus of knowledge. It’s all very ...”

“... level-headed than the fantasies woven around the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro in The Internationalists (2017), which traces the blessings of today’s ruled-based order to the schemes of assorted US bankers and Wall Street lawyers for universal peace in the same years, in a ne plus ultra of empty American ...”

“... list from which it sometimes seems that only the blessedly sane and sunny Sir Walter Scott will in the end be omitted. Faulkner’s ungrateful and ungracious treatment of his early mentor, Sherwood Anderson, may be charitably interpreted as youthful high jinks (although Karl brings out the malice of rivalry in ...”

“... Sarpi through Augustine, Cicero, Vasari, Winckelmann, Flaxman, Hegel, Heine, Baudelaire, Semper, Scott, Riegl, Feyerabend, Simone Weil and Adorno, ending with Roberto Longhi. In another, from Viktor Shklovsky through Tolstoy, Marcus Aurelius and popular riddles of Roman times, Antonio de Guevara and the transmission of medieval tales to the age of Charles ...”

“... much a part of the story. Art simplifies but life really piles it on. Why, for instance, did Jane Anderson sue the film company for libel over the portrayal of her as Joan Gilling in The Bell Jar, thereby broadcasting to the world information about her sexuality and mental health that she was ostensibly fighting to conceal? Why does Anne Stevenson, who never ...”

“... posed against a bleakly peeling wall, gazing sombrely into the distance with the garb and air of a Scott of the moral Antarctic. No doubt this image-making is the work of Penguin’s publicity department, rather than of Garton Ash himself, who has often given signs of modesty and dislike of such pretensions even in his friends, lamenting Václav Havel’s ...”

“... father figures. He would parody them. The Torrents of Spring is a mockery of the style of Sherwood Anderson, his earliest and most crucial patron. Of those who contributed to Hemingway’s career and writing practice, only Ezra Pound emerged unwounded. It is not clear why, though Pound’s imagism (deal with the thing itself, avoid abstract values, cut down on ...”

“... behaviour below. The star of that film, Keanu Reeves, also appears in The Matrix (1999) as Thomas Anderson, a.k.a. Neo, a company man turned hacker turned messiah. At the film’s conclusion, Neo phones in a proclamation of defiance from a booth on a busy street in the virtual world into which the bulk of the human species has been absorbed, before stepping ...”