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“... of literature who have presented their doctrines with that kind of cloudy enthusiasm which led Thomas Carlyle to call literature ‘a great foam-froth’. On both groups of authors Descombes is excellent. His account of structuralism with its emphasis on the debt to the mathematics of Bourbaki and to the practice of such anthropologists as Dumézil is a ...”

“... people are really good at heart.’ But, of course, Anne wrote that before the Germans got her. Thomas Keneally likes to run his fiction close to historical fact. An appended note to A Family Madness indicates the novel’s source: ‘In a suburb of Sydney, Australia, in July 1984, a family of five willingly ended their lives. Their consent to their own ...”

“... They took careful note of the lie of the land as well as the debris on the surface. Walter Scott was there, on his first trip abroad. By August, when he arrived, the site was a tourist attraction doing a roaring trade. ‘Men, women and children rushed out upon us, holding up swords, pistols, carabines and holsters,’ ...”

“... in Bengal. She got out of this by eloping to Ireland with her mother’s admirer, Lieutenant Thomas James. The shotgun marriage soon failed, however, and she escaped by way of another scandalous affair, with another lieutenant (called Lennox), who dumped her penniless in London just as James began suing for adultery. Rather sensibly, Eliza resolved to ...”

“... sitting in a control station thousands of miles away. Who could ask for more? In Objective Troy, Scott Shane explains why Barack Obama, when he became president, favoured drone warfare as his chief anti-terrorism tactic over the conventional wars of his predecessor: The number of al-Qaida plotters whose aim was to attack Americans was in the hundreds. Yet ...”

“... alike, to identify a new tendency in contemporary writing, before, on 1 October 1954, J.D. Scott, the literary editor of the Spectator, published (anonymously) a leading article entitled ‘In the Movement’. Modern Britain, Scott argued, was emancipating itself from the old social hierarchies of the prewar ...”

“... whoever designed it (Orbach proposes John James). The third prodigy of the English baroque, Thomas Archer, like Vanbrugh worked nearby in Dorset and Hampshire (both of which south Wiltshire might comfortably be part of). Vanbrugh is the possible author of Netherhampton House, between Salisbury and Wilton, a Venturi ‘shed’ avant la lettre. A ...”

“... the Sunday newspaper I had joined as a junior reporter sent me one Saturday afternoon to see Sir Thomas Beecham, then at the height of his fame as a conductor. The paper had written his profile, and I was told to take a proof and show it to him, to ensure that it was factually correct. Clutching the galleys, I rang the bell at his house in St John’s ...”

“... about that: he said the fondness for clans was a consequence of a Southern addiction to Walter Scott. He was only half-joking when he said that Scott’s heroic clans, and their readiness for battle, were responsible for the Civil War. Unlike the Hunts, the Bushes have never had their tycoon, although several have tried ...”

“... She’s intelligent, imaginative, inquisitive. Among her heroes are Houdini and Captain Scott; her goals, other than tracking down and punishing her brother’s killer, include breaking her own record for holding her breath underwater. She likes to ask awkward questions, and to disagree with her great-aunts about the Bible. She’s ...”

“... later accused him of forging a ‘hero image of Castro, in which all the virtues of Robin Hood and Thomas Jefferson, of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, were contained in a single man’. Matthews’s series caused an uproar in Cuba: Batista himself was enraged by it, and one of his top advisers dismissed Matthews’s reporting as ‘a chapter in a ...”

“... Thomas Grant’s​ Court Number One tells the stories of 11 prominent trials heard in Court One of the Old Bailey between 1907, when it opened, and 2003. His aim is to use these stories as illustrations of ‘British sensibilities and preoccupations over the last hundred years … Through the criminal trials … there can be traced at least one version of the history of social and moral change over the last century ...”

“... Paul Finkelman, McPherson also presents a very clear explanation of the significance of the Dred Scott case, in which the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Taney declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional, and added for good measure that when the Constitution was founded, a Negro had no rights that a white man was obliged to respect. This was ...”

“... and bulimic vulgarity got the genius it deserved,’ only to write a little later, apropos of Thomas McEvilley’s remark that ‘somehow the age demanded’ Schnabel: ‘the notion that the man is an emanation of the Zeitgeist no doubt matches the artist’s fantasies about himself.’ It also, of course, matches what Hughes has just said about him. I ...”

“... direct or indirect sustenance in Macpherson’s poems: Burns’s visionary ‘duans’; Walter Scott’s ‘translations’ of ‘Highland Minstrelsy’ in Waverley; Fenimore Cooper’s translatorese standing in for Native American languages; Byron’s ‘Imitation of Macpherson’s Ossian’; Goethe’s Werther; and ...”