“... the latter always be accepted as the truth? Or when Hemingway writes (in A Moveable Feast) that Scott Fitzgerald admitted to having been a virgin before he married Zelda, and the English actress Rosalinde Fuller writes that, on the contrary, she had a passionate affair with Fitzgerald before his marriage, should her evidence be proclaimed a ‘telling ...”

“... or Beyoncé popular; but neither is she some divisive figure out on the blasted perimeter, like Scott Walker. Devoted fans prize her as one of our culture’s great ungovernable Outsiders. This fan club includes the grandees of the French establishment, who in 2005 named her a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, making Smith about as much of an ...”

“... one of her essays on biography, “Lives of the Obscure”,’ Cohen notes in the preface, Virginia Woolf writes that ‘one likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded ghost … waiting, appealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom.’ This romance has its appeal. I have ...”

“... Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence [sic] Sterne; generosity indeed to double the number!’ A list so nakedly daft obviates ...”

“... series, which stresses female ability to cope with the weirdest of upheavals – as in Jody’s Scott’s I, Vampire, which takes another classic image of the rejected daughter, and traces her through vampirism, successful Cosmopolitan-style female executivehood, and a business as a Famous Donor Sperm collector, to galactic war and resurrection by an avatar ...”

“... be open in every biography worth a publisher’s advance. The subjects of Victorian biography, as Virginia Woolf put it, had been ‘like the wax figures now preserved in Westminster Abbey, that were carried in funeral processions through the street’. Froude’s Carlyle blew open the citadel of privacy. It encouraged public speculation about what Jane ...”

“... take up an invitation to complete the English version of Le Temps retrouvé after the death of Scott-Moncrieff. Though her admiration for Proust seems to have reached its limit at Sodome et Gomorrhe – ‘Alas! Alas!’ was her final comment – some of her other verdicts were less predictable. Like Proust, she was a Dreyfusard, for example; and her taste ...”

“... Witch Wood (1927) was his favourite – and his status as a Scottish monument, a descendant of Scott and Stevenson. There’s nothing fanciful about this – Janet Adam Smith reported that Clement Attlee pointed out to her a borrowing from Kidnapped in The Thirty-Nine Steps – and if he had had a slightly different temperament Buchan might have become a ...”

“... domestic agenda and the obstructions of two right-wing Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. With the Senate split 50-50 and deciding votes cast by the vice president, Manchin and Sinema (now both registered as Independents caucusing with the Democrats, neither of them running for re-election) maintained something ...”

“... at Göttingen before travelling across Europe, visiting collectors – including Goethe and Scott – and turning a sceptical eye on booksellers’ offers. His chief inspiration was the Göttingen university library, a product of the German Enlightenment, systematically organised and endowed with a yearly budget for new acquisitions. Cogswell hoped to ...”

“... in 1960, as did Born Free: both became huge films, starring the same actors, Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna. But by the year Camusfeàrna burned down, the non-human subjects were gone. The last was perhaps Kes, in Barry Hines’s novel A Kestrel for a Knave. Although that was fiction, and concerned a boy growing up in a very different milieu from that ...”

“... you what . . . You won’t find a nicer bit of woman’s flesh to be bought for that money in old Virginia. Don’t you see what a foot she has, so dainty and delicate, and what an ankle.’ But the trader is put off, because he suspects Hannah is ‘skittish’. Women turn skittish, he remarks, when they are parted from their children, though that is not ...”

“... took over his show while he was away. Soon after, Posobiec accompanied the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, to Ukraine. The traditional press corps was replaced with ‘friendly media’.The Gulf of Mexico was now the Gulf of America. The Associated Press, which declined to include the change in their style guide, no longer had a seat on Air Force ...”

“... to erudition, mentioning as he does not only Keats and Emerson but also, directly or indirectly, Virginia Woolf, Socrates, Diogenes, Spinoza, Aldous Huxley, Kierkegaard, Scott Fitzgerald, Proust, Kafka, Theodore Roethke and, repeatedly, Henry James. By coincidence, the theme that holds the novel together is introduced on ...”

“... in the cause. An article Prager read in the New Yorker referred to the plaintiffs in Loving v. Virginia, which overturned bans on interracial marriage, as the beau idéal. The Lovings had said all the right things, then stayed out of the limelight – and stayed married. They even had the perfect name. The few sentences on the more ...”