“... if not the glorification of the present’. There is a further near coincidence. In 1929, Lewis Namier began the patient deconstruction of England’s constitutional myths in The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, which jettisoned a grand narrative of statesmanship and party principle, and put in its place the microscopic study of ...”

“... gathered outside.) The poem is Hood’s ‘Ode to The Great Unknown’, addressed to Sir Walter Scott. Why, Hood wonders, is Scott never to be seen, though his works are so widely read (‘Parent of many children – child of none!’)? At the end of nine intricately rhymed pages, Hood lightheartedly concludes that there ...”

“... painting. For the first half of her long life, Gray knew everybody. At the Slade she met Wyndham Lewis, and soon made friends with the potter Bernard Leach, the explorer Henry Savage Landor and the sculptor Kathleen Bruce, later the wife of Captain Scott. Bruce found Eileen ‘loveable, though rather remote’, and noted ...”

“... are poems about Lenin, Aberdeen, Freud, Miss Brodie’s Edinburgh, King Lear, Hamlet, Gaelic, Scott, Keats, Australia, deer, a dead sheep – indeed, such variety of interest that you wonder what principle brings them together. In the poem about Lenin, Smith praises        the moving on into the endlessly various, real, human, world which is no ...”

“... open to infections that were thought, in industrialised countries, to be things of the past. As Lewis Thomas points out in his contribution to In Time of Plague, it gives us a glimpse of how most people in the world have always died: painfully, usually at an early age. And Aids, in another sense, returns us to the condition of our more recent forebears: it ...”

“... of nurture for the developing poet. Particularly acute is his demonstration of the importance of Lewis Spence to MacDiarmid. Bold argues convincingly that it was Spence’s attitude to nationalism and to the Scots language that encouraged Grieve to reverse his earlier condemnation of the attempt to write in that medium, and so stimulated the first Scots ...”

“... Gerard de Nerval, Terence Malick, lots of Yeats, lots and lots of Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’, Scott Fitzgerald, Delmore Schwartz, Marilyn Monroe, Un Chien Andalou, Hart Crane, Ben Hur... An index to proper names in the book would be several pages long. This all-pervasive cosmopolitan glamorousness, often treated ironically, is most vivid in ‘7, Middagh ...”

“... sarcasm and rage that alienated virtually all his friends. He picked on the ever-insultable Scott Fitzgerald, taunted Archibald MacLeish for not having a ‘big enough prick’, razzed Gertrude Stein as the ‘lesbian with the old menopause’. Things only got worse after 1936, when sour reviews of Green Hills of Africa left him more than usually ...”

“... of the viciously racist leader of the Native Americans, Bill ‘the Butcher’ Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis). With the triumph of the nativist gang (adorned and equipped, like their adversaries, in Braveheart meets Mad Max style), the Rabbits are outlawed and Priest’s young son, Amsterdam Vallon (soon to be Leonardo DiCaprio), is bundled off to a ...”

“... In addition to Shakespeare and Eliot, a.k.a. ‘the poet’, the novel glances at Melville, Scott Fitzgerald, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Lewis Carroll, Wilde (twice) and Peter Pan: ‘You know – by J.M. Barrie?’ At least when Pascal’s wager comes up for the first time, Marlowe says: ‘Who’s Pascal?’ Yet ...”

“... are descending & I resume my interesting Narrative’) and the twee Caledonian jests of Sir Walter Scott (‘I do not write for such dull elves!’). Elsewhere she announces: ‘I am going to write nothing but short Sentences.’ The result – rather more uncannily – is like proto-Gertrude Stein: There shall be two full stops in every Line. Layton and ...”

“... still worth having a go at Luther life-writing, and these three biographers all know their Luther. Scott Hendrix is a veteran insider historian from the American Protestant tradition, with the worthy aim of tackling some of the complacent myths all families build up about their founding fathers. His detail can be shaky when he refers to noises off, like the ...”

“... ruthlessness, sentimentality and greed. David Selznick came of age in that world. His father, Lewis Selznick, was an early, unsuccessful mogul. In a line not quoted here, he allegedly told his sons: ‘Live expensively! Throw it around! Give it away! Always remember to live beyond your means. It gives a man confidence.’ But if father was a joker, he was ...”

“... out of eight quarto volumes of steel engravings), the works of Homer, Milton, Sir Walter Scott, and so on and on and on. Not exactly a treasure trove, but getting so many books at once, with so few titles I would have chosen, moved me suddenly much closer to possession of my fantasy library. Some of the books were hard going – I never got on with ...”

“... my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it with contempt. ‘Hypertrophic . . . A ...”