“... Murray is right that Chris’s self-examination is also a display put on for the reader, a north-east of Scotland odalisque. She’s also right that the frequency of such episodes across the books is odd.Chris Guthrie was unavoidable at Aberdeen Grammar School in the academic year 1979-80, which is when I was doing my Higher English. The Scottish past ...”

“... same years when antiquarians worried that Rome was consuming its own substance to fuel its revival.Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson tells the story of these antiquarians and what they learned from the ruins that obsessed them. Their sensibility, as she shows, was itself ancient. In the age of Augustus, as Rome became a marble city, poets looked back with ...”

“... magazine of the New York school (and never mind for the nonce that Bellow is from Chicago and Susan Sontag from Los Angeles), several streams have originated. The dissident Left – as opposed to the proto-Communist Left – symbolised by Dwight Macdonald, Philip Rahv and others. The Cold War hardliners, such as Melvyn Lasky, Irving Kristol, James ...”

“... public than was the case with the keen lovers of the contemporary art of former periods. In North America, over the last quarter of a century at least, ‘modernism’ has almost always meant large works designed for the Museums of Modern Art. The first artists to produce works for such a destination were the supposed founders of the Modern ...”

“... copies across the border instead of his usual smuggled butter. We might have called it the Black North, for being dark with Protestants, but when I was a child in the 1960s, Ulster was the place British sweets came from: Spangles, Buttons and, most notably, Opal Fruits. It was across this border that the feminists of ‘the condom train’ staged a mass ...”

“... stupidity. If one puts that together with the unforgettable picture of Benn which emerges from Susan Crosland’s biography of Tony Crosland – Benn ringing up at all hours with phone pranks, practical jokes, impersonations and Goon Show voices – one realises that the common strand is a good-hearted boyishness. Far from being the sinister ogre of the ...”

“... more general and just as penetrating counterpoint of failure and its effects appeared earlier, in Susan Buck-Morss’s Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (2000). ‘The evaluation of the 20th century should not be left in the hands of its victors,’ she warns. It’s more important to understand why democracy failed, and ...”

“... in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the border. Wormald and other historians have done much to establish James’s political agility and challenge the homophobia and xenophobia that skewed interpretations of him alive and dead. But the caricature of a weak king drooling over his ...”

“... Amato Ragazzo, edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, and also in Letters to Younger Men, edited by Susan Gunter and Steven Jobe. The first letters by James to be published came in two volumes, overseen by the James family and edited by Percy Lubbock; they contained 403 letters and appeared in 1920, just four years after the novelist’s death. Lubbock found ...”

“... of compassion, comprehension and success. ‘Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship,’ Susan Sontag wrote, ‘in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.’ John Donne believed that illness is the kingdom, that it steals in and corrupts our lives: ‘The disease hath established a Kingdome, an Empire in mee, and will have certaine ...”

“... of Coney Island and the Rockefeller Centre; and, after one of the two empires had disappeared, Susan Buck-Morss, who in Dreamworld and Catastrophe (2000) shifted from elegiac speculations about the death of utopia to the low comedy of the resemblance between Stalin’s unbuilt Palace of the Soviets – a skyscraper topped by a giant Lenin – and its ...”

“... John Zerzan, a hermit who thought language was the root of the world’s problems; and L. Susan Brown, who held that anarchists should support Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that ‘there is no such thing as society.’ ‘When I normally encounter my so-called colleagues on the left,’ Bookchin once told a roomful of Ayn Rand acolytes, ‘they tell ...”

“... A Gathering of Fugitives. But although the genre has been sanctified by such outstanding books as Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation or Stuart Hampshire’s Modern Writers, compilations of this kind still often have something raffish and opportunistic about them. And nowhere do they more plainly invite suspicion than in the titles they bear. A Mania for ...”

“... As dozens​ of lagoons of pig waste overflow in North Carolina, President Trump says that Hurricane Florence is ‘one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water’. (In North Carolina 9.7 million pigs produce ten billion gallons of manure a year.)*President Trump says: ‘I hope to be able to put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to expose something that is truly a cancer in our country ...”

“... An eldest sister​ was born in the North, daughter of a judge who never lied and a scholar who always did. That was A.S. Byatt. Christened Susan, what on earth, she was later known as Dame Antonia. Byatt wrote about sugar and snails and sex cults and the dead children of children’s book authors ...”