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“... became Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University, was in effect the world’s first Professor of English Literature. He built his lectures on Smith’s work. Smith held that ‘we in this country are most of us very sensible that the perfection of language is very different from that we commonly speak ...”

“... that strikes you about Computation into Criticism is what it says about its Australian author’s dedication, or obsessiveness, or just plain nerve. Most literary research is cheap, and indeed looks very cheap as long as the cost of maintaining libraries is not counted in. John Burrows’s project of putting a dozen ...”

“... It will not​ have escaped such an audience as this that Sex played a large part in my uncle’s life.’ E.M. Forster was addressing an early meeting of the Bloomsbury Group’s Memoir Club, and was reading a paper about his closest male relation, the disliked, unmissed and now dead Uncle Willie ...”

“... minister walks through the playground, hampered by children in grey blazers, with the school’s headteacher, Sajid Raza, at his elbow. Cameron wrote to Raza a few days later to thank him, and added a handwritten note in blue ink: ‘I was really impressed and have told Michael Gove about your work. Keep it up!’ Less than two years later, police went to ...”

“... The contradictory quality of Carlyle’s achievement as intuitive sage, seminal interpreter of German Romanticism, sworn enemy of mechanical and reductive views of life, outrageous ranter and charismatic humbug is already present in the early Sartor Resartus, lively and opaque by turns, a book which inspired the young and bewildered their elders ...”

“... revulsion of a wife. For this is not, it must have leaked out by now, the traditional saint’s life expected of literary widows. Mrs Tynan chose to write a biography, she says, because she felt the need to assert her husband’s rightful place in 20th-century English letters and theatre history, but she has not erected ...”

“... Printing even a writer’s letters is at times an equivocal business. There’s always the question of what, exactly, of value they may tell us, of what there is that makes their publication more than merely intrusive. Forster lived a long time, and there’s some sorry reading in the second of these volumes ...”

“... Booker Prize in 1979 for her novel Offshore. Keneally was also on the shortlist, with Naipaul’s A Bend in the River the clear frontrunner. Julian Barnes remembers Paul Theroux, who was judging, saying he would ‘skim out into the pampas’ the candidates he considered non-starters; back from Patagonia, there he sat at the Booker dinner, ‘a polite smile ...”

“... me, a snow-scene dense enough to make the end of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ appear like a moment’s inclemency. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid had a feeling for the freezing lives of sheep, and he resurrected, or to some extent invented, the words that would capture the rude nature of the Scottish snowstorm, calling it the ‘yowdendrift’, when snow is blown ...”

“... his sudden death was a matter of coincidence or conspiracy remains unresolved. The Council’s warrant does not give a reason for Marlowe’s arrest, but we know it was connected to the arrest of his colleague Thomas Kyd a few days earlier, on a charge of political libelling. During the search of Kyd’...”

“... of this least Dostoevskian of writers. Poets’ lives are seldom eventful or interesting. There’s a great deal of looking out the window, pacing around, reading, writing, drinking, gossiping, complaining, especially about money and neglect, and more often than not ill-advised romantic attachments. Though money, or the want of it, was not among ...”

“... in a biography of the cartoonist Charles Addams; legend tells that she was Truman Capote’s inspiration for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Was it the clothes? As a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, Brennan wore white gloves to the office, and her vintage wardrobe and showy up-dos must have seemed ...”

“... Young women ‘of good character’ losing their heads and wishing they hadn’t. You feel so sorry for them, but can’t you sense what they tasted in the air as they were doing it: freedom, fury, the power – for once – of being young and strong and agile and a homegirl, the flat-out joy of getting your hands on some free stuff. ‘This is the ...”

“... vierge souveraine! Marjorie Annan Bryce in a Suffragette procession to mark George V’s coronation in 1911. The song was adopted by the Resistance during World War Two, because Domrémy, Joan of Arc’s birthplace, stood in the part of Lorraine that had not been ceded to Prussia after the French defeat in ...”

“... the SNP majorities in all seven Glasgow constituencies were around ten thousand. Labour’s hegemony in the city, which had seemed eternal, had suddenly evaporated. It was easy enough to find reasons for it, but the abruptness and scale of the party’s fall were still shocking.In 1922 thousands had gathered to ...”