“... Bodies and Put out more flags are skimped because he has dealt with them separately elsewhere, Scott-King’s Modern Europe and Love Among the Ruins are shrugged off as of little interest, which is all right with me. Brideshead Revisited receives 78 pages, while the others get about twenty each. Davis has also studied the circumstances under which they ...”

“... they have more money.’ Though it is Hemingway’s riposte that sticks in the memory, Scott Fitzgerald’s belief in the difference of the rich has one thing to be said for it: it makes far more sense of the history of the novel. The rich and their doings are clearly over-represented in the house of fiction, and access to wealth almost invariably ...”

“... helped create an appetite for new design styles. In 1973, before his success in Hollywood, Ridley Scott directed his famous television commercial for Hovis, featuring a boy delivering bread by bicycle up a steep, cobbled street of chocolate box cottages – perhaps the most expert encapsulation and commodification of the era’s rural yearnings. ...”

“... of the first two volumes of his great History of England, published in 1848, rivalled those of Scott and Dickens. The main reason for his popularity, apart from his literary style, was that he flattered the English by crediting them with a unique history of evolving ‘freedom’. Hall thinks – what might at first glance appear paradoxical – that he ...”

“... the same pointed zeal as have the sequels to Austen. In the 20th century dozens of sequels, from Margaret Dashwood, or Interference (a sequel to Sense and Sensibility by Edith Charlotte Brown, 1929) to Consequence, or Whatever Became of Charlotte Lucas (Elizabeth Newark, 1997) and Desire & Duty: A Sequel to Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (Ted ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... out on their bowling night’. A long way, Bech thinks, from Maxwell Perkins. Bech is like Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby, a minor sideline in fiction, to be relaxed with rather than worked at. But Updike nevertheless makes some sharp observations on current enemies of promise. And the whole set is enlivened by unrelenting bitchery. The rave notices of ...”

“... requiris, circumspice. Even those, John Campbell suggests, who have little or no memory of Margaret Thatcher, live in a world she created; and from which there is no going back. More than any other British prime minister, even Gladstone, she conforms to Max Weber’s type of the modern demagogic politician: the leader who appeals directly to the ...”

“... compromise or flattery (two supremely silly treatments). And there have been undressed dolls too. Margaret Fuller, the pioneer American feminist, wrote that ‘since Adam, there has been none that approached nearer fitness to stand up before God and angels in the naked majesty of manhood than Robert Burns.’ Catherine Carswell wrote a brave, Lawrentian ...”

“... may beg to differ. The early recordings are painfully stagey. The first, from 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s narrating a public information film: the Eton boating song ‘conjures up for me a very pleasant ...”

“... and widowhood. Yet she was merely a charming eccentric at bottom, one of those comic ladies, like Margaret Rutherford playing Miss Marple; Keith’s character, like that of Addison’s Sir Roger de Coverley, was there to inform us of the harmlessness and ineffectuality of a defunct class represented by this posthumously lively personality. Helen Mirren’s ...”

“... anxious consultation with the queen about the difficulty of finding a second husband for Princess Margaret and at another accompanying Idi Amin on the viola, enjoying his ‘light tenor’ in a selection of parlour ballads. The atmosphere of the Diary cast an aura of wild improbability over even such presumably real events as a press reception for the English ...”

“... world makes itself continuously felt in these letters. A parade of distinguished visitors, from Margaret Fuller Ossoli to Goethe’s grandson, pays court to the Brownings in Florence. On a sojourn in Paris, the poets finally manage a much anticipated meeting with George Sand, who – greatly to Arabella’s disapproval, apparently – begins their ...”

“... grandly plotted fictions embedded in the kind of wide historical novelscapes constructed by Walter Scott and Stendhal. Neither project was tremendously successful; there is nothing in the collection to disturb the conventional wisdom that Pushkin was a poet of genius who also wrote good prose. If Tales of Belkin gleam with possibility and the beginnings of ...”

“... general as it has developed since the French Revolution, and been sated by offerings from Walter Scott to Ken Burns, Tolstoy to Margaret Mitchell, Hilary Mantel to Ben Pastor. Pastor seems to have invented a new way of combining the whole and the part in what TV producers might call the limited series.Yet it might chasten ...”