“... 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 ...”

“... to Venezuela in the late 1590s, but never again set foot there himself. In 1618 he persuaded King James to let him out of the Tower, where he’d spent 13 years concocting his Guinea Balsam and writing the History of the World under a suspended death sentence. He was allowed a final attempt to find El Dorado, on the outcome of which hung pardon or ...”

“... full alignment with those EU internal market and customs union rules that support North-South co-operation and the Good Friday Agreement. This would mean that Northern Ireland in effect stays in the EU. That will sit comfortably with the government’s assurances to the DUP only if the rest of the UK stays in the customs union and single market too (or if ...”

“... Maurier’s image of a multiple revenant’. Kim Novak poses as a woman obsessed with ancestors; James Stewart’s Scottie, a mental invalid and an accomplice in murder like so many of du Maurier’s men, tries to transform Novak into the woman he became obsessed with, setting about the task with the rage of a Svengali; ‘no adaptation of a du Maurier novel ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It’s a relief. The centuries after Burns’s death have produced some honest fiction about him (James Barke’s quintet of novels are the best known). But there has also been a procession of biographers dressing their own Burns dolls in their own favourite costumes. There was the ‘heav’n-taught ploughman’ school, mourning an Ayrshire nightingale ...”

“... Early 19th-century Edinburgh had a lot less time for James Hogg than for the Ettrick Shepherd, the literary persona created partly by Hogg himself, partly by the tight circle that ran Blackwood’s Magazine. Comic, bibulous, full of naive folk-wisdom, easy to patronise, the Ettrick Shepherd was invented as a souvenir of the pastoral Lowlands, a survival whose presence among one of the Edinburgh literary élites could represent both the continuity of modern Scots culture and the impolite past it had left behind ...”

“... which is resting on a table. Sedgwick explains that this woman is the ‘outsider’ artist Judith Scott, with one of her works, a core ‘hidden under many wrapped or darned layers of multicoloured yarn, cord, ribbon, rope and other fibre … whose scale bears comparison to Scott’s own body’. Judith ...”

“... names faded once their work slid out of print, once-prominent tastemakers such as Stark Young and James Gibbons Huneker. Tynan’s review collections have joined theirs in the second-hand stores, but he himself stays hot copy. Words aren’t enough to sustain a journalistic legend; neither are looks, photogenic as he was. ‘What makes a figure is the ...”

“... of Richardson’s novels, two generations later – Lady Louisa Stuart, whose Memoire of Frances Scott, Lady Douglas as she became, has been redeemed from the archives of the Border nobility, with the blessing of a former prime minister, Lord Home. The memoir appears to have been written at some point in the 1820s, and is addressed to Frances’s daughter in ...”

“... the alien spirit of British Protestantism through working for his uncle, the businessman Alexander Scott. For these eclectic experiences to leave their mark on his work, mere exposure was not enough; I suspect the reason Leskov still haunts the purgatory of reputations is that he sacrificed a portion of his ego on the altar of doubt. While Tolstoy set his face ...”

“... Five hundred years ago, in autumn 1513, James IV, one of the most effective and attractive of Scotland’s rulers, led an army of unusual size and quality into northern England. The young Henry VIII had embarked on a military expedition in northern France, and Scotland responded to French calls for aid by invading England ...”

“... the cold corollary: if you failed, you’re a loser and have only your inadequate self to blame. Scott Sandage has written a splendid book about this American madness. He takes his chorus from Emerson: ‘There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune.’ Talented workers grow rich. Sandage contends that this myth – he’ll catch hell ...”

“... and ‘in the last resort’ dealt ‘not with facts but with truth’. One thinks also of James Agate, who described not what happened but what he thought should have happened and called it ‘the higher truth’. Strachey, it seems, was not above inventing a ‘fact’ – he gave Dr Arnold short legs to make him look sillier. In Eminent Edwardians ...”