“... Scottish Language (1808), in the 1920s, and Edwin Muir’s refusal to fall for it, as codified in Scott and Scotland, published in 1936. Gibbon’s position is different from both. His Scots has a source in spoken language, recognisable to me as what emitted from faces I knew by firelight in my childhood, too: tormented, coarse, folk, brave, fine in the first ...”

“... nightly in cinema queues? What, indeed? ‘Aren’t we going to be told who everyone is?’ said Susan, looking around the room and smiling. Effects like these have little in common with the ways of Swann or the beaches of Balbec; let alone celluloid derivatives. Lastly, and in many ways most significantly for reception at large, there is a difference of ...”

“... hallway, waiting for someone … She often wrote with her eyes closed, which Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar use for their argument that she was ‘essentially a trance writer’. The debate about how ‘instinctive’ (therefore less impressive to some) her process was doesn’t seem to me to be the best way of evaluating the books, though it would be ...”