“... of the Modern has the crowd scenes and bustle of the historiography of its period, the age of Scott, Guizot, Thiers and de Tocqueville. The language, on the other hand, practised, vigorous, unreflective and rather characterless, belongs to modern serious journalism. Johnson’s four interweaving themes – ‘big’ politics, commerce and ...”

“... is a charming charade. When the girls are not quietly occupied in their rooms – Aleph reading Scott, Sefton deep in Thucydides, and Moy painting fey pictures or shifting her stones around by telekinesis or shepherding an insect to the safety of the outdoors – they are mostly to be found in the Aviary singing madrigals or old-fashioned sentimental love ...”

“... Werfel into English. Only a paltry nickel-and-dime dispute lost him the commission to complete Scott-Moncrieff’s version of A la recherche du temps perdu. (As you reel from this thought, reflect that instead he attained immortality by his translation of the Austrian folk tale Bambi, which carried a moist Foreword from ...”

“... that these rebellions amount to much. They manifest themselves as the high seriousness of trivia (John Baldessari’s alphabetical list of the contents of his files of movie stills); as Native American bluster and vanity; as halfbaked intellectualism; above all, as the intoning of feminist and other contemporary cultural pieties. (Yvonne Rainer: ‘At this ...”

“... an age of biography, and flowed into other literary forms in abundance, taking over the novel of Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, the poetry of Browning. The same curiosity about people and their relationships, possessions and environment is an academic subject now, called social anthropology. For the older reader and indeed the older critic, time has stood ...”

“... Montacute a familiar type, and applaud Stewart’s accurate evocation of the world of Liddell and Scott, Kennedy’s Latin Primer, the exploits of Cotta, Labienus, Vercingetorix et al., the dubious pleasures of early-morning Greek. But nuances of this kind are likely to be missed by many of his readers, for whom the OTC and Responsions are assumed, unwisely I ...”

“... returned together to America, and married in May 1929. By this time ‘Fuzzy’ was already seeing John Millet, psychiatrist, at the Austen Higgs Centre in Stockbridge. ‘Fuzzy’ was fatal. He was very handsome. He had genuine artistic talents. He insisted on the importance of extreme physical activity, but was himself fragile. He and Alice had eight ...”

“... Thesaurus of the Northern languages, but again did not pick up popularity till after Walter Scott. ‘Valkyries’ were introduced to English by Gray in 1768, closely followed by Percy’s translation of the Swiss professor Paul-Henri Mallet’s Monuments de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves. But ...”

“... With the introduction of the private detective film four years later, the other noir founders, John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, shifted audience identification from hunted to hunter. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon made Bogart a star, although the refugee Peter Lorre provides the film’s only moment of genuine fright Wilder, the ...”

“... Continuum’ savages every ‘Golden Age’ cliché it can find right down to the classic line: ‘John, we’ve forgotten our food pills.’ Try that in the high-fibre age! The list of mid-Eighties new authors is incomparably stronger than that of the mid-Seventies: Benford, Gibson, Crowley, Powers, Shea, Brin, Wolfe, Morrow, Elgin, as opposed to what then ...”

“... never found time to read it, but had given it to his secretary, ‘who told him it stinks’ (F. Scott Fitzgerald was employed on one of the many rewrites). Huxley summed up his feelings about the movie business in a letter to his brother, Julian. Producers had the ‘minds of chimpanzees, agitated and infinitely distractable’. As a prospective ...”

“... Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald – almost any actor who appeared in a John Hughes teen film qualified). The Literary Brat Pack was a journalistic readymade, roping together a number of writers who may have scarcely known each other and treating them as a floating soirée. It was cartoonish and unfair to most of the individuals ...”

“... of O’Connor’s women seem to have forgiven and indeed to have continued to love him. Even Maria Scott, who never saw him again after he left her and their children because she thought ‘he’d say something so awful, so destructive,’ missed him. ‘Philip spoilt me for other men,’ she told Barrow. Something of that state of mind was harshly illuminated ...”

“... Strachey found something of the same attraction in Newton’s older contemporary, the biographer John Aubrey. Strachey saw himself as the product of an ‘embryonic generation’ almost as remote now from the Victorians as Aubrey had been from the Middle Ages, yet as Aubrey was haunted by the lost world of medieval magic, so Strachey and the other club ...”

“... First published in France in 1817, the princess’s prison journal was translated into English by John Wilson Croker in 1823. Croker noted that several passages are obscure, and one or two contradictory: there are frequent repetitions, and a general want of arrangement. All these, which would be defects in a regular history, increase the value of this ...”