“... Splendid​ specimens of the untrousered, strong-legged Celt’. That was what John Stuart Blackie, the founder of Scotland’s first chair of Celtic studies in 1882, liked to see about him in the Highlands. In Celts: Art and Identity (at the British Museum until 31 January, then at the National Museum of Scotland from 30 March until 25 September) he would have met several untrousered, strong-legged giants ...”

“... about – in the parlance of creative writing schools – what they “know”.’ She quotes John Gardner saying that ‘great writers tell the truth exactly – and get it right.’ But, she says, ‘for the modern British – more to the point, English – novelist, this notion of truth is a little obscured and inaccessible.’ Historical novels and ...”

“... and there was nothing like empire to give vanity rocket-like lift. In Karsh’s photograph of John Buchan, who was governor of Canada in the 1930s, the wildly popular novelist wears a North American Indian war bonnet, his weathered face is in semi-profile, he’s wearing gloves, and he looks as if he could take on an ...”

“... preachy bits of text reminding us of the ‘migration’ of African-Americans towards jobs in the North and the difficulties of race relations. The lecturing effect is mitigated by the magnificent Jacob Lawrence paintings in the background, and effectively collapses when the text asserts that ‘change was inevitable.’ One major point of the movie is how ...”

“... I discover, admitted to his French translator that he had never spent much time in Shropshire), John Clare, A.A. Milne, Shelley, Blake, Eliot (Macavity, not Prufrock) and – thanks to Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes’s Rattle Bag, and Geoffrey Grigson’s anthology Unrespectable Verse – a swarm of lesser-known poets.Among these has been Charles ...”

“... but, at the same time, there was a backlash over plans to build a university campus on the north side of the river. People were saying: “Hang on, if you do that there will never be a shipyard on the Wear again.” And it was bonkers, because the shipyards had gone for ever, but there was this reluctance to leave them behind.’The ...”

“... Empire. Their ideas were no less hierarchical and authoritarian than those of George III and Lord North ... had Burke been in office during the American Revolution, we might merely have had to antedate his counter-revolutionary Toryism by some twenty years.’ This was a reference to Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in certain ...”

“... of a Nice American Kid. (He still speaks of latterday players as ‘kids’, a term that sits on John Newcombe and Stan Smith as askew as on a lord mayor.) He was tall and, if not quite clean-cut, skinny. He looked as if he would converse by shuffling his large feet and muttering ‘Aw, shucks’. (Thus kids muttered in novels of the period. What they said ...”

“... chronology. Each chapter doubles back and forth among the centuries. You no sooner settle to North American women pretend-naives of circa 1845 than the next paragraph knocks you back to 17th-century Ravenna. The hypothesis is unavoidable that Ms Greer committed her researches to a card index in which some natural catastrophe shuffled the entries and ...”

“... Virginia Woolf, and I believe James Joyce, though I learn from the volume before me that Sir John Reith, reigning at the BBC, forbade Nicolson to mention Ulysses, then banned. Little encounters of that kind were to be expected in those days, and Nicolson seems not to have attempted to reason with the great man on this occasion. Such high matters were ...”

“... hasn’t yet looked into the extent of this practice.As children of the spied-on, my brother John and I knew that the telephones in both our parents’ houses were tapped (they divorced when we were young). My dad had been a surveillance target since the formation of SDS, and probably before. It was obvious, sometimes, talking to a schoolfriend on the ...”

“... of Arados, Tripoli, Byblos, Beirut, Sidon and Tyre. In 814, settlers from Tyre founded Carthage in North Africa, which would later become an imperial power in its own right, claiming its own ‘Phoenician’ empire. By 332, the idea of Phoenicia in the east came to an end as these cities were conquered by Alexander. Carthage fell to Rome in 146, and was ...”

“... last poems.) From the time he went at the age of 18 to Vanderbilt and attracted the attention of John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren it was glory all the way until he enlisted in the services a decade later. When in 1934 Allen Tate put together a poetry supplement for a magazine, it included several poets with firm reputations, but was headed by five ...”

“... believed the Arctic must be a hell, others believed it must be a heaven. Roger Bacon thought that north beyond a rim of ice at the Arctic Circle was a paradise where flourished the Hyperboreans: ‘a very happy race, which dies only from satiety of life, attaining which it casts itself from a lofty rock into the sea’. For many centuries the Arctic has been ...”

“... early 20th centuries, determined to halt Russia’s Inner Asian advance and ‘secure’ its own North Indian frontier, Britain fought three wars with the Afghans. It failed to subdue them but acquired substantial influence over Afghan foreign relations. Britain also sought to counter Russia by colonising oil-rich Iran, a far greater prize, but achieved only ...”