“... paid to that, yet it still owed more to Hollywood than to any brand of Scottish realism outside of Walter Scott. When the home team finally arrived in the stadium – wearing a tartan that might have put Technicolor out of business before it started – the stadium was incandescent with belief and the children around me cried. The management of sentiment is a ...”

“... American policy. Thomas treads familiar and on the whole uncontroversial ground: the influence of George Kennan, the warnings of Winston Churchill, the first steps toward the formation of the containment policy. But here, as elsewhere, there is a one-sided, deterministic quality to the story he tells. Western policy-makers are curiously reactive figures in ...”

“... 1856, for example, described the inquest held at the Talbot Inn, Rugeley on the exhumed body of Walter Palmer five months after his murder by his brother William, the multiple poisoner. On the removal of the outer coffin a hole was bored in the leaden receptacle in which Walter Palmer’s body was confined, and instantly ...”

“... of Coleridge’s collected works edges, with the Biographia Literaria edited by James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, a bit past its halfway point. Nine of the projected 16 volumes are now in print. In addition, three of the projected five volumes of the private Notebooks have appeared. (They are a separate Bollingen project, though Kathleen Coburn is in ...”

“... and least reliable fictional characters: Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove (1902) and George Darrow in The Reef (1912). Like other biographies tracking the ‘invisible lives’ of writers’ lovers – Claire Tomalin’s Life of Dickens’s Ellen Ternan, or the now-forgotten but interesting Portrait of Zélide (Benjamin Constant’s mistress, Mme ...”

“... share a concern with changing gender values, sexual ‘deviance’ and whatever else allowed George Gissing to describe the late 19th century as a time of sexual anarchy? Or has Showalter merely been able to present similar myths und images by cleverly shuffling the information – and there is plenty of it – that her research assistant has gathered ...”

“... while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning. Walter Benjamin believed that works of literature secreted certain meanings which might be released only in their afterlife, as they came to be read in as yet unforeseeable situations. He thought much the same about history in general. The past itself is ...”

“... his only son, Malcolm, born on the bonny banks of Lochranza, the beauty of which inspired Sir Walter Scott to the curmudgeonly reflection that ‘wake where’er he may, man wakes to care and toil.’ So it proved with the Macmillans. Malcolm prospered though hard work on his poor land, becoming a tacks man, a kulak among crofters, who served as an elder ...”

“... a world so wonderful for the ‘haves’ could not stay always secure. By the later days of Sir Walter Scott the dangerous forces of working-class unrest and political protest were deeply unsettling. Today we may relate that unrest to the increased share of the new prosperity of a modernising and developing society which had been mopped up by the ...”

“... that he has relied in part on ‘books written by two magnificent Victorians, Edward Walford and Walter Thornbury’: their works, first published in 1875 and 1879 respectively, contain much doubtful anecdotage and often come close to deserving the Athenaeum’s strictures. Exaggeration and egregious self-praise are, alas, also still with us in the ...”

“... happens when you skewer open the tin can which has been lurking at the back of the cupboard – Walter Benjamin’s ‘slice of pandemonium’. The detective shape-shifts but never quite belongs. The skein he unravels reinforces his isolation, as the bearer of a revelation which is too much for the recipients to stand. The constant motion of the detective ...”

“... that the Atomic Energy Authority, or Con Allday and British Nuclear Fuels, or the men around Sir Walter Marshall in the CEGB, would have taken time off to authorise private detective agencies to rummage round the house of a 78-year-old former rose-grower who had written an elegant, though unoriginal paper on the arcane problems of nuclear waste disposal and ...”

“... in a live debate), Obama concluded by locking himself to the middle classes and John McCain to George Bush. Neither McCain’s folksiness nor his jokiness rang true (a quip question about a $3m federal programme to study the DNA of bears in Montana and whether it was about criminality or paternity fell flat). His repeated message was that Obama didn’t ...”

“... enough to ignore him? Another example: in 1809 a duel occurred between two Secretaries of State, George Canning and Lord Castlereagh. Canning was the son of an actress and had never before fired a gun; Castlereagh was an Irishman who went on to commit suicide. Did their willingness to fight derive from the fact that they were members of Britain’s ...”

“... refers in the letter to a number of acquaintances, some of them prominent, such as the jurist George Joseph Bell and the scientist Sir David Brewster, and some of them obscure. Close friends used to forgather with him at the house of Woodhall in the lea of the Pentland Hills, where the letter was written. The house was that of the philanthropic Miss ...”