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“... In culture? In the past? In its music? The musicologist and advocate of the Scots language Billy Kay feels passionately about Robert Fergusson, the wild-child poet who died in the Edinburgh bedlam at 24. In Stromness, Montrose, Lochgelly, Stirling, he recited Fergusson’s verses. And then Karine Polwart sang the song that the dying Fergusson ...”

“... historical dimension. Sometimes this merely means the offering of non-facts as if they were facts. Kay Carmichael criticises the rate of increase of child benefit since 1948 without recognising that it did not exist at that date, and attributes attitudes to the Scottish Poor Law which were those of the Charity Organisation Society. More serious is the use of ...”

“... was published his editor talked him into jettisoning a novel he’d worked on for six years. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, his first published novel, is the third he’s written. Fountain seems resigned to being seen as the slowest pen in the South so long as it’s understood that he isn’t a listless procrastinator. Interviewers tend to walk away ...”

“... appeared, Patricia (‘Patsy’) Cornwell had come a long way. Scribner acquired the first Kay Scarpetta novel, Postmortem (written in the mid-Eighties, turned down by seven publishers, revised in the late Eighties, published in 1990), for $6000. From Potter’s Field, the sixth Scarpetta novel and Cornwell’s last for Scribner, was published in ...”

“... sick with silly epigraphs: from Marilyn Monroe, Kafka, Lenny Bruce (who occupies an entire page), Billy Wilder, Madonna (or the ‘popular singer Madonna Ciccone’, as Smith has it, a tic that runs throughout the book), Walter Benjamin (or ‘the popular wise guy Walter Benjamin’). Each chapter has a cute digest at its head, announcing the delights on ...”

“... practice on the road, and she was Groucho’s unhappiest real-life casualty until his wives Ruth, Kay and Eden. His first marriage, to Ruth Johnson, took a long time to unravel. She had fallen in love with his quickness. Closer up, Groucho resembled his on-stage character in ways she found disturbing. He could say ‘I want to be alone,’ in a vaguely Slavic ...”