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“... anything, or is simply an overblown caprice, may depend on the susceptibilities of the reader. Allan Massie’s development as a novelist has been less ambitious, though with each novel he has become more solid, circumstantial and impressive. The Death of Men, his third, though it lacks the very individual mordant melancholy of The Last Peacock, is his ...”

“... like, ‘Hoots, man – I dinna understand you sae weel now,’ and describes Theocritus as ‘the Allan Ramsay o’ Sicily’. One episode has the Shepherd galloping naked around Selkirkshire on an angry bull. When a new version of Hogg’s 1807 Memoir appeared in 1821, Blackwood’s carried a review so brutal (he is ‘the greatest boar on earth’; his ...”

“... to the other world and bring the girl back. The Storm of London (1904) by F. Dickberry    Young Lord Somerville wakes to find all his clothes missing. In fact, all clothing has vanished from England. After the initial shock, life resumes in the nude. People learn they must take better care of their bodies and become healthier. Class distinctions, once ...”

“... not yet gentrified as SoHo or rebranded as the East Village. ‘Blue Blue Blue’ (1956) by Allan Kaprow The gallery is packed with work, the most exciting of it raw, rude and abrasive. The sculptor George Segal made a career out of positioning life-size white plaster figures in furnished tableaux, so it’s a jolt to encounter one of his early works ...”

“... seems to have been ignited by the pictures he saw at the National Gallery during his travels as a young artist: small Turner watercolours ‘with distorted reflections in windows – or mirrors perhaps’, Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait, in which the mirror behind the couple reflects two figures at the door and The Rokeby Venus by Velásquez, in which ...”

“... James was typical of the guerrillas of Jackson and Clay Counties, the vast majority of whom were young and from prosperous slave-holding families. They were also merciless killers, and Stiles recounts their atrocities in detail. The killings were often revenge attacks and after the war, James continued to kill those who sought to resist or impede him and ...”

“... can also stand for what is sometimes gained in translation. For instance, the French open up Edgar Allan Poe and out pops Baudelaire. Here, what has been lost in translation – Poe’s energetic vapidity – represents an enormous gain. Equally, the new-style doll will cover plagiarism, the original sin. For example, Baudelaire’s essay, ‘Edgar ...”

“... did the first Gothicists frame their tales. It’s not until the 1830s and 40s, with Edgar Allan Poe, that the Gothic begins to shift the emphasis away from all this gloomy hardware and become increasingly fascinated with the psyche of the Gothic personality ... With Poe the Gothic turns inward, and starts rigorously to explore extreme states of ...”

“... held in their hands warped inside him, and he wore it like a cloak ...’ This is the work of a young English writer drawing on her own experience of a remote valley in Venezuela, but recording it with an eye more on the bizarre or appalling than on ordinary life. Even the domestic details seem hardly ordinary – such as vulture’s eggs for supper, or ...”

“... In the wake of its success in the States, there are a slew of novelisations, adaptations for very young readers, and even a brand-new Alcott novel on the way – an unpublished thriller called A Long Fatal Love Chase, written in 1866 and rejected then as too sensational. Kent Bicknell, the New England headmaster who heard that the manuscript was for sale and ...”

“... and senior military figures, the list supposedly included a fading dancer and actress called Maud Allan, who had recently appeared in two private performances of Oscar Wilde’s Salome: enough to generate moral fury in Pemberton Billing and his gang. He was prosecuted for alleging Allan’s involvement in an article in ...”

“... expected the Government to stop Murdoch getting his hands on their team.) Campbell phoned Tim Allan, director of corporate communications at BSkyB, to find out what was happening. He didn’t have to introduce himself. Allan was Campbell’s deputy at the Downing Street press office until he took a well-padded chair in ...”

“... he used jargon known as Mickyspeak. He was once heard telling a former international that a young bowler in his side bowled ‘too many wicket-taking balls’. ‘How many wickets has he taken, then?’ the old boy asked, and was left scratching his head when informed that, well, actually he hadn’t taken any at all. A wicket-taking ball is one which ...”

“... later this editorial attitude had hardened: Kinghorn and Law’s 1974 edition of the poems of Allan Ramsay and Fergusson included only two of Fergusson’s English poems (and none of Ramsay’s); James Robertson’s Selected Poems, published in 2000, and the most accessible edition of Fergusson’s poetry in print, contains only four poems in English. The ...”

“... The death of a beautiful woman,’ Edgar Allan Poe wrote, ‘is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.’ Mary Rogers, ‘the Beautiful Cigar Girl’ whose corpse was fished from the Hudson in New York in 1841, was the prototype for many subsequent mystery tales – not least Poe’s own story, ‘The Mysterious Death of Marie Roget ...”