“... since before the First World War. The epithet ‘triumphant’ in the title of the new volume of John Richardson’s magnum opus has a brash, swaggering ring: fittingly so. This is the tale of an extremely rich and famous man who came pretty near to doing whatever he wanted. The Picasso of the 1920s was physically strong and socially supple: he could charm ...”

“... The week​ before he was fired from MGM, late in 1931, Scott Fitzgerald was having lunch with the screenwriter Dwight Taylor in the company canteen when something, or even two things, more disturbing than his own drunken dreams appeared and sat at his table. The apparition was a pair of Siamese twins. ‘One of them picked up the menu,’ Taylor remembered, ‘and, without even looking at the other asked: “What are you going to have?” Scott turned pea-green and, putting his hand to his mouth, rushed for the great outdoors ...”

“... has gone horribly wrong, and the solace the authors find in the architecture of Caruso St John or Eric Parry does not make up for it. No guide to London’s architecture has ever been so successful. Regularly updated from top to bottom every decade or so since its first publication in 1983 it obviously fulfils a need. There is no shortage of guides to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with the wives answering the phones. Then: world domination. Welcome to the inside track on what Scott Fitzgerald called ‘the orgastic future’. In Britain, soap operas tend to be about poor people, and the drama of American capitalism can seem both obnoxious and ridiculous, yet the rise of CAA is a wonderful story of greed and genius. What is a good ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Given the ingenuity revealed by her analysis, it is odd that Gish should take so literally F.G. Scott’s account of the poem’s composition. The story goes that MacDiarmid had no more than a group of disconnected lyrics when Scott shut himself up in a hotel room with the poet and a bottle of whisky and showed him how to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”