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“... Published in eight volumes between 1763 and 1783, her History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution was massive in scale and the dominant occupation of her adult life; a sequel, The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time, published in 1778, was written in a more relaxed conversational style as a series of ...”

“... interest in the collection and presentation of minute facts impressed one of his Glasgow auditors, James Boswell, whose marvellous accumulation. The Life of Samuel Johnson, is a major peak in the Scottish eclectic tradition. In Edinburgh, formulating the canon of the new university study of English Literature, Blair tried to inscribe a marked Scottish ...”

“... both sides know the game. And as the form becomes more self-conscious, the writer – Henry James is the obvious example – indicates both inside and outside his novel how the reader will divide the work with him and share the spoils. In this partnership we become lucid and wise. Even the most unlikely circumstances are arranged for our ...”

“... work of John Prebble’s that all these tartans were nothing but hype: a stunt devised chiefly by Scott to make George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in August 1822 as splendiferous as possible. In his anonymous shilling pamphlet ‘HINTS addressed to the INHABITANTS OF EDINBURGH AND OTHERS in prospect of HIS MAJESTY’S VISIT by an Old Citizen’, ...”

“... Bengal. She got out of this by eloping to Ireland with her mother’s admirer, Lieutenant Thomas James. The shotgun marriage soon failed, however, and she escaped by way of another scandalous affair, with another lieutenant (called Lennox), who dumped her penniless in London just as James began suing for adultery. Rather ...”

“... machinery illegally to arm the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Very early on in the war, Casey and Co decided to back Iraq. Perhaps they were influenced by the huge wealth of friendly dictatorships in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, both of whom were hot supporters of Saddam. Perhaps they were still upset by the anti-US slogans of the 1979 Iranian ...”

“... rather as an early difficulty that had to be overcome – one of the Union’s teething troubles. James McPherson, who has spent most of his academic life in the study of abolitionism and the related struggles of the Civil War era, has written a narrative history that comes as close to being both comprehensive and definitive as seems possible in a single ...”

“... he has to show, and does show, the teenager eagerly approaching a distinguished man of letters, James Ashcroft Noble (‘my note-book would show you that I am not wasting my time out of doors at least’), his dissipations at Oxford, the complexity, beauty and bloody-mindedness of his love for Helen Noble, the disheartening untidiness of life in a cottage ...”

“... Gus Van Sant’s new film, Milk, is thoughtful, patient, funny and touching, and both Sean Penn and James Franco should get Oscars, but it doesn’t answer the questions any biopic raises for me: what’s it for and why now? Or perhaps it does have the answers, but we have to do our own digging for them. Harvey Milk was an elected official of the city of San Francisco, said to be the first openly gay man to hold public office in the United States ...”

“... has become something of a party game. To my knowledge, there are five versions currently on offer. Scott Moncrieff renders it as ‘For a long time I used to go to bed early.’ Terence Kilmartin reproduced this in his revised translation, but Enright, in his revision of Kilmartin, has altered ‘used to go’ to ‘would go’. In addition, ...”

“... They took careful note of the lie of the land as well as the debris on the surface. Walter Scott was there, on his first trip abroad. By August, when he arrived, the site was a tourist attraction doing a roaring trade. ‘Men, women and children rushed out upon us, holding up swords, pistols, carabines and holsters,’ ...”

“... James Angleton​ , chief of counterintelligence at the CIA for twenty years, was not the ideal spy. The ideal spy is a mouse-coloured blur in the crowd, someone like George Smiley, described by his wife as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. There was nothing ordinary about Angleton. Once experienced, his history, his appearance, his manner, and his stubborn refusal to be clear were all indelible ...”

“... does, somewhere between literary respectability and bestsellerdom: John O’Hara, Nelson Algren, James Jones, John Hersey. Parini declares in a fighting Afterword that answers to the Steinbeck question ‘spring to mind’. Clearly the answer which springs highest and most persistently is intellectual snobbery. Steinbeck’s low status is ascribed to the ...”

“... crab and lobster from the sea channels nearby that Edwin was sickened by it for life. His father, James, ‘took a special delight’ in sowing barley by hand and the whole family ‘felt the first day was a special day’ when ‘the black fields glistened, and a row of meal-coloured sacks, bursting full like the haunches of horses, ran down each one.’ But ...”

“... bringing a Norwegian princess to marry the Scottish king. In the version transcribed by Walter Scott, one of the stanzas runs:Be it wind, be it weet, be it hail, be it sleet,Our ship must sail the faem;The king’s daughter of Noroway,’Tis we maun fetch her hame.Williamson relates this to Borges’s obsession with his long-lost love Norah Lange, an ...”