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“... which was begun by 1806 but not published until 1819. Though written in the manner and metre which Scott had popularised at the time of its inception, in subjectmatter Benjamin the Waggoner comes closer to Crabbe or (especially) to Burns. It is a genial anecdote about a loved local figure, kind to vagrants, good with horses, but over-attached to the bottle ...”

“... added physiognomical principles to their stock of ideas: Goethe, Heine, Herder, Novalis, Jean Paul, Madame de Staël, Stendhal, George Sand. Many English writers, resisting the fanaticism with which phrenology was being promoted (George Combe’s The Constitution of Man, the central manifesto of the cult, sold 50,000 copies between 1835 and 1838 ...”

“... founded by a rather more public-spirited buccaneer of book collecting, John Pierpont Morgan). Paul Meyer’s career was a model of all that is best in academic rigour; he later helped analyse the documents which led to the acquittal of Alfred Dreyfus. The History of William Marshal contains nearly twenty thousand lines of Norman-French verse, around which ...”

“... for the rest of his life). Young Gustave was slow learning to read – a slowness from which Jean-Paul Sartre’s monster psychography L’Idiot de la famille was able to draw life-shaping conclusions – but not slow in wanting to write. At 18 he not only wrote but got published in a review a sketch that Brown describes as ‘brilliantly mordant’, which it ...”

“... as A Void) or telling Ophelia’s side of the story using only the words Shakespeare allots her (Paul Griffiths’s Let Me Tell You). McBride compensates by scattering full stops with a liberal, raisin-loaf-making hand, but her avoidance of commas is enough to shake up other conventions. Commas bred freely in the favourable conditions of proto and early ...”

“... immediately fails. The call-back felt like ‘a flood of light had burst into the apartment on St Paul Street and caught us out.’ The sadness of the defeated Democrats has flooded Keith’s story; it seeps, too, into Mark’s and Sam’s. Sam starts out luckier, seeming to know what the moment is about already and what his part in it is: ‘What Sam needed ...”

“... sanitarily and commercially. He raised money for a fashionable chapel by George Gilbert Scott as well as new boarding houses, decently appointed and, from the mid-1850s, complete with water closets. He promoted an Arnoldian style of religious and moral education, centred on his own weekly sermon. And most important of all, for ultimately it was ...”

“... Why should peers and baronets be prominent in the British elite of 2024? Take Sir (Walter) John Scott, 5th baronet, countryside campaigner and snuff manufacturer (‘chairman of Sir Walter Scott’s Fine Border Snuff, 2012-, chairman of North Pennine Hunt 2008-’). Google suggests that Sir John is a rather small fish ...”

“... to do. It would have been a lot sadder if they died before achieving what they were meant to. Like Scott. Scott was bad, I was out of it for days.’‘He probably wasn’t happy about it either.’‘Whereas Amundsen’s death was a bit more ambiguous. He did what he set out to. And then there was something decent about him ...”

“... and Scottish father in Eastbourne in May 1940 and raised in Balham in South London. She married Paul Carter in 1960 when she was just twenty, then moved with her husband to Bristol, where she wrote four novels in quick succession and started publishing her journalism in New Society magazine. Her third novel won a travel award of £500, which Carter used to ...”

“... the pivotal period is now moved on, surely reasonably, to 1914-18. Reminiscent in some ways of Paul Fussell’s work, and of Robert Wohl’s The Generation of 1914 in others, this book has a thesis. Like Wolff’s, it works outward from particular occasions to generalisations. One is the first night of Le Sacre du Printemps in May 1913, ‘a milestone in ...”

“... Thesaurus of the Northern languages, but again did not pick up popularity till after Walter Scott. ‘Valkyries’ were introduced to English by Gray in 1768, closely followed by Percy’s translation of the Swiss professor Paul-Henri Mallet’s Monuments de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes et ...”

“... detective in The long Goodbye. (Although Murder, My Sweet was produced and directed by Adrian Scott and Edward Dmytryk, future members of the Hollywood Ten, it shuns politics in the same way as the other Marlowe movies; Roman Polanski’s Chinatown is, as Hiney says, the film heir of Chandler’s LA.) like business crime and political corruption, the ...”

“... their divergences became more evident. McInerney achingly, almost poignantly, longed for the F. Scott Fitzgerald doomed glamour of extravagance and careless waste, raptures of the deep followed by hangovers of the damned. McInerney, you felt, craved critical and collegial approval, the respect of his peers and elders (he and Norman Mailer became friends), a ...”

“... immaculately planned funerary procession, by limousine and gun-carriage, out of Westminster to St Paul’s Cathedral, had the appearance, on the news feeds streaming unwitnessed into the cafés and pubs of the Thames Gateway, of a triumphalist police outing, a reunion for veterans of the Battle of Orgreave. A reunion attended, in true British fashion, by a ...”