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“... Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and near the end was one poem that certainly might, in its intensity, be described as ‘short’ – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This almost token poem, a magnificent simple affair that most of us did at school, is the world’s most ...”

“... such sources at their word. Not that many historians wrote about the revolution. The exception was C.L.R. James, whose Black Jacobins, published in 1938, was neglected for decades then reissued in 1963 as decolonisation movements gained momentum across the African continent.Writing about the Haitian Revolution has often ...”

“... technology, complicated and unreliable even with ‘a remote control concealed in my watch (very James Bond)’; there are the clumsy mortifications of everyday life; and there is the spectre of oneself in coming years as a ‘damper on every party, a dud at every dinner table. A grandfather unable to communicate with his growing grandchildren, in the ...”

“... is the description of the ancient Scottish seat of the Roman Catholic earls of Glenallan in Walter Scott’s The Antiquary. The late Countess, ‘partly from a haughty contempt of the times in which she lived, partly from her sense of family pride’, had not permitted the interiors to be modernised. The ‘valuable collection of pictures’, which hung in ...”

“... It was a curious set of circumstances that in 1820 drove James Cooper (the ‘middle surname’ Fenimore would not be added for another six years), the son of one of post-independence America’s wealthiest land speculators, to embark on a career in the dubious and unpredictable world of novel-writing. Almost nothing in Cooper’s life up until that year, in which he turned 31, indicates an interest in fiction, or in the arts ...”

“... was to turn him into a Bonny Prince Charlie figure, and lament romantic Ireland dead and gone. Scott did much the same, with enormous profit to his sales, by celebrating the past glories of Scotland, glories safely past thanks to the unromantic prosperity of the Union. Tom Moore was to follow suit, his romantic Irish ballads bringing tears to the eyes of ...”

“... even when she’s supposed to be falling for the mush; and with Hepburn . . . Well, this is what Scott Berg’s vivid and subtle memoir is all about. Berg, the biographer of Maxwell Perkins, Sam Goldwyn, Charles Lindbergh and (in the works) Woodrow Wilson, first met Hepburn in 1982, when she was 75, and was a close friend until she died at the end of June ...”

“... nationalist (hence the pre-eminence, as cited sources, of Shakespeare, laureate of England, and Scott, laureate of the Union), and chauvinistically masculine. Jesperson’s luckless observation that ‘the English language seems positively and expressly masculine, it is the language of a grown-up man and has very little childish or feminine about it’ is ...”

“... upon the troubled passage of the Revolution’s reputation across the centuries. The deposition of James left the English with a guilty conscience which they have never shaken off. The men who drove the lawful hereditary ruler from the throne and replaced him by a usurping Dutchman searched vainly for a theory to justify their coup. They might claim that ...”

“... the story. A ‘large’ man is all we have for description from the legally adept Mrs Maxwell Scott, the last person to whom Lucan spoke that night. Nor in her many interviews with the Police and others has Mrs Maxwell Scott given any further details, even though she was with Lucan for two hours or so. She even used ...”

“... horses. Dick Haymes was a brutal, abusive, manipulative drunk. Her brief marriage to the director James Hill was a last misconceived attempt to find calm and stability away from the film business. It was typical of her that she had chosen a man determined to reestablish her career. She was divorced from him by the judge who had married her to Orson Welles 18 ...”

“... a down payment on a house.’ Perhaps the most profound observation of all comes from Montgomery Scott, a.k.a. ‘Scotty’, chief engineer aboard the USS Enterprise, addressing Captain James T. Kirk: ‘But I canna change the laws of physics, Captain!’ Other than travelling faster than the speed of light, that is. Iron ...”

“... form has to begin there, however far it may then wander from him. Built around the work of Walter Scott, Lukács’s theory makes five principal claims. The classical form of the historical novel is an epic depicting a transformation of popular life through a set of representative human types whose lives are reshaped by sweeping social forces. Famous ...”

“... Lewis Grassic Gibbon (the pen-name of James Leslie Mitchell) is put forward as his country’s great 20th-century novelist: the Scottish D.H. Lawrence. Gibbon’s reputation substantially rests on A Scots Quair (‘quire’ – or ‘gathering of sheets’), also called ‘The Mearns Trilogy’, Mearns being an ancient name for Kincardineshire, now itself an ancient name after the county reorganisation of 1975 ...”

“... Honourable Artillery Company, was a devout Christian who launched the Hammer House of Horror (Sir James Carreras). All demonstrated that a spell in uniform, as the sovereign’s trusty and well-beloved, never cramped a creative talent, and perhaps that a creative talent never cramped a military one. The singularity of their careers has earned them a place ...”