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“... Adorno and Althusser are as much at home in Jane Austen’s dressing-room as are Dostoevsky and Scott Fitzgerald. This may be all to the good, though it leads him to such remarks as that Elizabeth Bennet’s ‘gay resilience in a society tending always towards dull conformity would make her a worthy heroine in a Stendhal novel, which cannot be said for ...”

“... urbane Old Etonian leader of the Liberal Party, had been accused of conspiring to murder Norman Scott, a former male model and Thorpe’s sometime lover, who had become a danger to his reputation and career. In the event the only victim was Scott’s great Dane, Rinka, shot dead on Exmoor by a hired hitman (a former ...”

“... the docks by leaping over the flames (as one jumps over the bonfire to fend off evil spirits on St John’s night), and he and his best friend, Luís Terranova, an extrovert tango singer and his temperamental opposite, go into hiding for the rest of the war. Some time later Luís is taken as a sexual pet by the local censor, Commander Dez, who, like many of ...”

“... like ‘The Murdered Drinker’ are masterly, invoking as they do the narrative spirit of Scott and Stevenson as well as Hardy (and Hardy learnt much from Scott): To set the scene. The night Wind is rushing the moon Across the winter road. A mile away a farm Blinks its oily eye. There may be a certain ...”

“... the question should be shelved for the moment. How near or far from the real thing is Sir Walter Scott, whose art intuits everything implied in the new genre and the new expectations, and who in Waverley specifically places the art world of Scottish picturesque history in opposition to the real bourgeois world of progressive England? In having things both ...”

“... There is,’ John Lord Campbell observed in his multi-volume, Mid-Victorian Lives of the Lord Chancellors, ‘no office in the history of any nation that has been filled with such a long succession of distinguished and interesting men as the office of Lord Chancellor.’ A roll-call which included such illustrious history-makers as Wolsey, More, Bacon and Clarendon lent some credence to Campbell’s hyperbole ...”

“... Most loyal and protective of Gurney’s many friends, Marion Scott wrote after one of her regular visits to the asylum: ‘Ivor is so heart-breakingly sane in his insanity.’ Letters, reported conversation, music, poems all attest to the fact. He was trained and already admired as a composer before enlistment; in the trenches poetry had occupied him more and more and, when he returned afterwards to music, the poetry continued ...”

“... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue ...”

“... story about other writers, and was delighted when his friend Frank Swinnerton ventured to call on John Galsworthy in the country, and reported that the great man had risen from his work-table exclaiming gravely: ‘I say, Swinnerton, this is very sporting of you, very sporting indeed.’ Oddly enough, Walpole has probably lasted better than Mackenzie and ...”

“... can be no doubt’. It was seemingly this illib-eral philistinism that made Wordsworth, Southey, Scott, de Quincey, Byron and Shelley all oppose the movement. Jane Austen – who was female and gentrified and self-accusing enough to waver – said that she thought that the title of Hannah More’s Evangelical novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, showed ...”

“... of architecture is replete with figures whose careers were tied to the fortunes of great cities. John Nash’s genius for town-planning could only have flourished in London during the post-Waterloo boom years. Stanford White’s feeling for opulence fits the New York scene of the 1890s like an evening glove. So, too, did mid-Victorian Glasgow define the ...”

“... of Nations. It is the price of a useful and virtuous existence, of influence and undying fame. John Home’s History of the Rebellion of 1745 was not published until 1802, so Smith may not have seen it (though I bet he did). It contains an account of the meeting between Lochiel and Charles Edward at MacDonald of Boradale’s. Lochiel argued long and hard ...”

“... the benefits of fresh air, cured Macaulay.According to a gossipy neighbour, the writer Sarah Scott, Graham had ‘etherised and electrified her, till he has made her electric’ – possibly a euphemism for Macaulay’s new-found notoriety. In 1778 the widowed 47-year-old married Graham’s 21-year-old younger brother, William – a purported letter of ...”

“... straining after girlishness at the age of 34. But then her whole life, and career, were a strain. Scott Fitzgerald said on Thalberg’s death, ‘The Golden Bowl is broken,’ and the same might be said for Shearer’s career. A more accurate portrait of the Thalberg-Shearer ménage than the rabbi’s can be found in Fitzgerald’ short story ‘Crazy ...”

“... they have more money.’ Though it is Hemingway’s riposte that sticks in the memory, Scott Fitzgerald’s belief in the difference of the rich has one thing to be said for it: it makes far more sense of the history of the novel. The rich and their doings are clearly over-represented in the house of fiction, and access to wealth almost invariably ...”