“... of the mission’. The sergeant Hollywood called up for this particular assignment was Ridley Scott, son of an army officer, who had by 2001 acquired a handy reputation for ‘getting difficult and novel adventure pictures done’. The US army provided the helicopters and a week or two of basic training for the cast.Thomson reckons it was Lewis ...”

“... hospitals in unmarked vans, and unloaded at back entrances. I heard about despair. I heard General John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, say of the insurgents: ‘I don’t think that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away ...”

“... value out of these few pages, you should also be capable of recognising allusions to Walter Scott’s Kenilworth and to the ‘War Song of Dinas Vawr’, a poem from Thomas Love Peacock’s The Misfortunes of Elphin:     Ednyfed, king of Dyfed, His head was borne before us; His wine and beasts supplied our feasts, And his overthrow, our ...”

“... yuppies and lager louts, Essex Men and the Bright Young Things of Waugh and Huxley and Eliot and Scott Fitzgerald. The narrator describes the night of the flood, his glimpse of the entrance to the ark – ‘a dry risen corridor of light’ – and his own strange survival, borne out of the rain by a unicorn into a cottage full of animals – a cottage which ...”

“... The instruments of expansion were heavily-armed horsemen, castles and siege-engines (‘Walter Scott and Hollywood had it right’). Cavalrymen were dressed in iron at a time when iron had up to fifty times the value relative to what it has today, a ‘staggering investment’ indeed. The overall story is of a ‘dramatic reversal of the pattern of ...”

“... what has been the common experience of novelists. Fielding, Jane Austen, Thackeray, demonstrably Scott and Dickens, could trace their story-making bent to some such exercise of the creative imagination in youth, however it was subsequently put to the uses of art. Trollope’s statement does not take us far toward possessing a key to his own distinctive ...”

“... in Limbo. His image was enshrined, like those of Robin Hood, Louis XI and Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott. In the 20th century, he has inspired that most typical of modern accolades, the debunking biography. Newby’s book – for the general reader, it appears – follows hard (though for the most part independently) on the remorselessly scholarly study by ...”

“... telephone had become a casualty of some particularly dire financial emergency.I was examined by John Gowen, an Englishman with a small practice in Youghal, who drove up to Brook Lodge a couple of hours later. The epidemic had begun in July – polio was sometimes called the ‘summer plague’ – and he can’t have had much doubt about what the diagnosis ...”

“... hand, was genuinely strange. A high-wire walker who is artist in residence at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York, he is described, with a simpering smile from Dr Guntern, as conquistador of the useless. Petit is a tiny, frail man who looks like a haggard Jean-Louis Barrault. He offers magic tricks and his offences against the social norms to the ...”

“... did nothing to help Byron’s character; but he could hardly have been Byron without it. Scott astutely thought him ‘a patrician on principle’: the business of being important was crucially important to the business of being Byron. His snobbery was mostly venial. He liked the idea of his mother’s family more than his father’s because of its ...”

“... doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it. First, the zealots today are no longer the progressives on the left – liberals, socialists, trade unionists. Instead they are predominantly on ...”

“... gentlemen’s clubs. A cricket club doesn’t sell season tickets, Durham’s commercial director, Scott Sherrard, told me: it sells membership. A member isn’t just a fan, he’s one of us. So it seems unlikely, on the face of it, that England could owe its cricketing success to the strategies of Billy Beane. A cricket club feels very much like an insider ...”

“... opaque dourness enveloping the place. She found a handy prototype in the narrators of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels: honourable if rather dozy young Englishmen such as Rob Roy’s Frank Osbaldistone who undertake perilous expeditions into the wild regions north of the border. These young men turn out to possess a combative streak perfectly calibrated ...”

“... but which have been familiar to historians since the days of S.R. Gardiner and W.R. Scott. While the incidents do not themselves amount to ‘irrefutable proof’, the author tells us, they do suggest that such incessant attacks ‘alienated’ the city fathers and caused them to enter into an alliance with the Parliamentary leaders. Since the ...”

“... and not everyone wanted the whole thing). The poem appears to have been known in some form to John Ball, one of the leaders of the Great Rising of 1381. Copying always changed texts: scribes made deliberate corrections and accidental mistakes and often translated into their own dialects. Scholars no longer understand these changes as corruptions of a ...”