“... in the CIA for at least 15 years. And the lying spreads. This point has been made by Peter Dale Scott in a contribution to the Pelican Assassinations (1978): ‘The Watergate investigations revealed that many men in government will conspire against the law when two justifications are offered – whether or not these justifications are credible or are ...”

“... she was already playing with myth. In this case she used the legend, as recounted by the antiquary Thomas Browne, that the unicorn can be caught only if he is lured by a virgin left alone in a wood. Carter draws the narrative out from the flattened plane of tapestry it usually inhabits, animating it with one of her first big girls, one who is ‘raw and huge ...”

“... periodical, the New Age, and to meet Scottish intellectuals including the composer Francis George Scott (to whom Hugh MacDiarmid would dedicate A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle) and a French lecturer at Glasgow University called Denis Saurat (who is often credited with giving the 1920s Scottish literary renaissance its name). Most important, ‘in the early ...”

“... Holyhead. The Company failed soon enough and Jones returned to writing, publishing two sub-Walter Scott epic poems, Corayda and Lord Lindsay, and most ambitiously, My Life, a verse novel cum autobiography which Taylor sees as having affinities with Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’. The main character is Jones’s idealised version of himself as the aristocrat ...”

“... that has characterised my other short-term collecting crazes – the great Scottish civil engineer Thomas Telford. To be more precise, when out driving, I have been going out of my way to visit engineering projects he was involved in designing or building. I came across the most recent addition to my collection in early October. I had driven through ...”

“... His career began auspiciously in the early 1940s with the enthusiastic support of his hero Dylan Thomas, but the surrealism of his early collections, such as Cage without Grievance and 2ND Poems, seemed to mark him out as an oddity who could easily be ignored. The White Threshold in 1949 and The Nightfishing in 1955 made a conscious break with his earliest ...”

“... might be a better phrase since the self is often split by extreme stress and exhaustion (Doug Scott speaking to his feet in his bivouac with Dougal Haston near the summit of Everest, Joe Simpson’s ‘voice’ that kept him right on his agonising descent). It is a mark of John Harrison’s quality in Climbers that he never milks accidents to produce ...”

“... or to The Archers. The self-awareness of the novel in regard to its public is curiously subtle. Thomas Mann and Arnold Bennett would have taken it for granted, like Scott, that though their reconstructions might not appeal to everyone, they would be read by a complete cross-section of the reading public, from the ...”

“... Thomas Hardy, it is said, believed the history of humanity could be written in six words: ‘They lived, they suffered, they died.’ As a historical account this was more than adequate. It depicted change over time, contained a point of view, and encapsulated a universally applicable lesson. What detail the story lacked could be supplied by readers, each in their own way ...”

“... Thirlwell’s narrator, in other words, badly wants to be the kind of novelist – Saul Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Mann are among those he quotes, according to the postscript – who could make Literature out of the thin delusions of a reprobate like Haffner. Unless, of course, it is Thirlwell who wants to be ...”

“... important when a master gave him tea and cake. Byron entertained ‘high notions of his rank’, Thomas Moore said, and he wasn’t alone in thinking that ennoblement did nothing to help Byron’s character; but he could hardly have been Byron without it. Scott astutely thought him ‘a patrician on principle’: the ...”

“... sense (there is none of the proto-Romantic feeling for the sublimity of nature that animates, say, Thomas Amory’s John Buncle, partly set in Bage’s own county of Derbyshire). What is significant is the author’s resolute provincialism – few if any early English novelists had a more confident indifference to London. That revolutionary ideas might develop ...”

“... are also more likely to pull in the punters. If literary works forget to mention the clitoris, as Scott and Thackeray unaccountably do, you can always put them right. Hence the current practice of rewriting the classics so as to make them more ‘accessible’, adding a touch of cleavage to Emma Woodhouse or dash of zoophilia to Mr Knightley. Novels whose ...”

“... it still takes what Hegel described as the valet’s perspective on the future of the continent. Thomas Meaney GreeceTwo years ago, David Cameron saw himself out of office, respecting the result of the referendum he had unwisely called. For three years now, Alexis Tsipras has clung to power in Athens by disrespecting the results of his own referendum. The ...”

“... in New York to the one in Bilbao, he is often called a genius without a blush of embarrassment (Thomas Krens, Guggenheim director and Gehry ‘collaborator’, can’t get enough of the word). Why all the hoopla? Is this designer of metallic museums and curvy concert halls, luxury houses and flashy corporate headquarters, truly Our Greatest Living ...”