“... was eager to present Pepys as morally serious, even grave, and in this he almost succeeded: Walter Scott, reviewing the first edition in 1826, declared that Pepys had ‘no crimes to conceal, and no very important vices to apologise for’. He praised Pepys for remaining at his post during the plague (a period Pepys found unexpectedly enjoyable, especially ...”

“... of her own range of knowledge, and she seems to ignore his views, so I may speak up. C.S. Lewis, in the first chapter of his survey of English 16th-century literature (1954), said that earlier writers had treated magic as fanciful and remote, but in this period they felt it might be going on in the next street; and one reason was a thing they ...”

“... public is curiously subtle. Thomas Mann and Arnold Bennett would have taken it for granted, like Scott, that though their reconstructions might not appeal to everyone, they would be read by a complete cross-section of the reading public, from the discerning connoisseur to those who were getting something out of the lending library. In the same way, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ecclesiastical work of the high modern years’ – Clifton Cathedral, the work of Richard Gilbert Scott or Sam Scorer – ‘prompts awe. But that awe is more likely to be aesthetic rather than religious; it is not different to that which is incited by a grand hangar or concert hall – the potency of a building is quite distinct from its nobility (or ...”

“... Three years later, a newly-elected Labour government set up another secret inquiry by a barrister, Lewis Hawser QC. Hawser did for James Hanratty what another barrister, Scott Henderson, had done for Timothy Evans, who was wrongly convicted of the murder of his child. By concentrating on minute differences of detail in ...”

“... a magnificent essay on Beckett’s Film, as well as a two-volume work on cinema), on literature (Lewis Carroll, Zola, Scott Fitzgerald, Artaud, Proust, Melville, Whitman, Kafka, Beckett and T.E. Lawrence, among others), and on painting (including an essay on the French artist Gérard Fromanger which likens painting to ...”

“... or not he joined a discussion about whether the Chief Justice was evil or stupid. But Anthony Lewis, writing in the New York Review of Books, said that his own research cast great doubt on some of the most sensational ‘disclosures’ of the book. (Woodward and Armstrong have now replied to Lewis, but his research ...”

“... be about Jim Crow or a resigned black man or West Coast cool any longer.’ When the pianist John Lewis, the leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet, heard Coleman perform with Cherry in Los Angeles, he compared them to ‘twins’: ‘they play together like I’ve never heard anybody play together.’In November 1959, Coleman took his new quartet – Cherry, who ...”

“... the most bizarre scholarly collaborations ever, between the conservative, Jewish and Polish-born Lewis Namier and an English country gentleman of advanced Fabian opinions, Josiah Clement Wedgwood MP. In the late 1920s both men were made profoundly pessimistic by the rise of totalitarianism in Western and Eastern Europe. Namier sought refuge in 18th-century ...”

“... breaks of blackness, harsh juxtapositions of sound and image, snatches of ‘Pirate Jenny’ and Scott Joplin’s ‘Maple Leaf Rag’. Everything is difficult and uncomfortable and unpleasant, everybody is tired out and knows they’re failing, including, I’d imagine, the filmmakers, who must have known their work would be of no use to the people it was ...”

“... more secular world. Ten years ago one might have dismissed this as a throwback to the days of C.S. Lewis and his like, when the attempt to find Catholic allegory in the late romances was a recognised minority sport, but in the late Nineties it suddenly looks like the critical craze of the moment. Richard Wilson, for example, published an article in the TLS a ...”

“... Great unknowns, pen names and spoof attributions figure centrally in the genre’s history, from Scott, to George Eliot, to Kilgore Trout. According to the massive, nine-volume Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature there are, largely speaking, only three reasons for masked authorship, all prudential: ‘Generally the motive is some form ...”

“... version of the novel of polite sentiment, the second is a historical tale in the manner of Scott but arguably without the consolations of romance or the safety of historical distance. But among all these other things they are both versions of the early 19th-century genre, the ‘national tale’, a genre that imagines the coming-together of opposed ...”

“... the cold corollary: if you failed, you’re a loser and have only your inadequate self to blame. Scott Sandage has written a splendid book about this American madness. He takes his chorus from Emerson: ‘There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune.’ Talented workers grow rich. Sandage contends that this myth – he’ll catch hell ...”