“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 even more so because its sensational image may encourage false, 20th-century expectations. But John Burrow will not mind. He writes to burst joy’s bubble upon the tongue. A Liberal Descent, like the works of 19th-century historical scholarship that it discusses, is written out of a tradition that respects personality (which is not at all the same thing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a visionary monologue notionally addressed to a love-object, though her reality is pretty foggy. John Stuart Mill read the poem attentively in preparation for a review which never appeared, although Browning did later get to see his notes and was understandably struck by one of Mill’s sharper comments: ‘The writer seems to me possessed with a more ...”

“... and editors. Other leading figures also do both, including, in this country, Christopher Ricks and John Carey. But most critics in good repute don’t seem to want to edit, and wouldn’t be any good if they tried. The provocative element in McGann’s position for them will be his serious belief in the centrality of the role of the editor. He goes back to the ...”

“... thought I’d been drinking.’ The Amis style, though, doesn’t altogether fit its new context. John Self would gorge himself on emetic burgers but he wouldn’t analyse his own motives for cholesterol abuse, as Miller does: ‘I knew the stuff I was cramming into my body was crap, but I also knew there was something seductive and pleasure-giving about it ...”