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“... least twelve plays with such magnificent success. The arch-rationalist Mark Twain held Sir Walter Scott to blame for the disabling romanticism of the American South: Tennessee Williams, brought up on the Waverley novels, was a joyful victim of the disease. ‘I write out of love for the South … I think the war between romanticism and the hostility to it is ...”

“... of oppression, are among our permanent national characteristics. So wrote one of Sir Walter Scott’s anonymous competitors in the preface to The Court of Holyrood: Fragments of an Old Story (1822), neatly describing the emotional dynamic by which narratives about Mary Queen of Scots, such as this historical romance itself, could be used to serve the ...”

“... acting deliberately against the interests and wishes of his British imperial superiors, even – Scott Anderson suggests – to the point of treason. (When George V tried to decorate him after the war, he handed all the medals back on the spot.) He was also very much against European cultural imperialism, genuinely – so far as we can tell – preferring ...”

“... Lincoln and King transformed these figures in national memory from trouble-makers into healers, as Michael Eric Dyson puts it in I May Not Get there with You, an attempt to bring King back to political life. But while Lincoln turned in his last months from racial justice to national reconciliation, King had been moving in the opposite direction at the time of ...”

“... materials as the Elizabethan grammar-school curriculum, the Shakespearean epigraphs to chapters in Scott and the gift shop at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, and to relate them cogently to Shakespeare’s writings themselves. The jacket tells us that ‘Jonathan Bate has been described as “our finest Shakespeare scholar”,’ and while this remark might carry ...”

“... The continuing American blindness to Vietnam itself, in this and many other instances, notably Michael Cimino’s film The Deer Hunter (1978), can be astonishing, but the myth also shows some genuine self-understanding. Apocalypse Now, in particular, is full of the sense that Americans exported whole chunks of their culture to Vietnam and discovered its ...”

“... pleasure. But Mackenzie’s influence at the time was far greater, and it was international. Both Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson were fascinated by him: the lush vivacity of his prose not only animates the former’s early novels (intended to be ‘intellectual’ like H.G. Wells, ‘and improper like Compton Mackenzie’), but is just as evident in the ...”

“... inside a Department – as in the case of what came to me from Clive Ponting. A careful look at Michael Heseltine’s lengthy broadcast evidence shows what exactly was taking place in the Whitehall stratosphere during the month in which Hilda Murrell was murdered. On 6 March Denzil Davies wrote to the Prime Minister, about discrepancies in Mrs Thatcher’s ...”

“... He has some regular correspondents and confidants – Robert Lachenay, his school friend, Helen Scott, who worked with him on the Hitchcock book, Annette Insdorf, who wrote a book about him – but also writes to friends at the Cahiers, to actors with whom he is working, to journalists requesting information, people who send him scripts, offer him ...”

“... alike, to identify a new tendency in contemporary writing, before, on 1 October 1954, J.D. Scott, the literary editor of the Spectator, published (anonymously) a leading article entitled ‘In the Movement’. Modern Britain, Scott argued, was emancipating itself from the old social hierarchies of the prewar ...”

“... the dream of paranoia, and look after them. So Lucan is signing off. There was another letter, to Michael Stoop, who had lent him the car, which said: ‘I have had a traumatic night of unbelievable coincidence. However I won’t bore you with anything.’ This was the only evidence of the ‘intruder’ that the family and Ms Moore cling to. Lucan, as we ...”

“... Charles Moore, for instance – very little survives here; even the more familiar ones, like Michael Graves, are relatively defamiliarised within this extraordinarily overpopulated meteorological zone). The 24 ‘works’ – project descriptions, actually – range from interior decoration (the Branson Coates Arca di Noe restaurant in Sapporo) to Beth ...”

“... an early suffragist. She knew how to earn good money as a dressmaker and hen-keeper. Her husband Michael Cleary was an educated and literate cooper, whose services were much in demand by local businesses. He had served his apprenticeship in the progressive town of Clonmel and had good prospects. As a couple, they seemed the very image of a modernising ...”

“... The best-known publication date in English literature,’ says Michael Mason of 1798. But the terse, intelligent Introduction to his new edition of the Lyrical Ballads seems out to disperse the sense of unique significance sticking to the year. Mason points out that the original version of 1798, which was anonymous, caught on less well than the second (1800), twice as long, and firmly attributed to Wordsworth alone ...”

“... as it sounded so familiar, but it turns out the music was specially commissioned, from Julian Scott.) Montages of film clips play throughout on further screens, concocting essence of Hollywood in several flavours: romance, western, fantasy, history, sci-fi, thriller, noir. But the same costumes look very different on screen; the face, the gestures, and ...”