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“... been long-needed by me. The other Oxford book is more curious. In 1979 appeared in one volume James Gibson’s Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy: A Variorum Edition. And this Richard Taylor calls ‘a major publishing event ... carried out with meticulous care and loving exactness ...’ That is putting it a bit steep, but the book is on my shelves, it ...”

“... Inside most collections of letters is another ghostly volume we are unable to read, for it contains all those letters that have been lost or destroyed. Hence a scholarly enterprise such as the Purdy/Millgate edition, now complete, of Hardy’s letters, handsomely produced and impeccably edited though it is – or perhaps precisely because it has such a finished and monumental look – can inadvertently create a false impression ...”

“... to do. Irene was the second of the five Langhorne sisters of Richmond, Virginia. She married Dana Gibson, the inventor of the Gibson girl. Famous for her beauty from coast to coast, she never got divorced and never gave any trouble, so she doesn’t come into James Fox’s story much; and ...”

“... John Gibson​ was born in 1827 in rural Ireland. He went to sea at the age of twelve – the family were poor – but at 34 settled as a grocer in St Mary’s, the largest of the Scilly Isles. His business grew, and in 1870 he opened a photographic portrait studio attached to the shop. He had taken a course in Plymouth and was now equipped to shoot the people of the isles ...”

“... they often made attempts to identify cities known from biblical and classical sources. Claudius James Rich, of the East India Company, correctly identified, explored and mapped Babylon and Nineveh, and visited many other sites. Excavation and extraction began in earnest in 1842, when Paul-Emile Botta, the French consul, dug huge winged bulls and wall slabs ...”

“... in Vietnam. We see them anyway, collected in Slotkin’s book and in Warrior Dreams (1994) by James William Gibson. When Philip Caputo joined the Marines, he saw himself ‘charging up some distant beachhead, like John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima’. ‘War movies with John Wayne’ sent Ron Kovic to Vietnam: ‘Yes, I ...”

“... David Gibson was a man stiff and parsonical; by all accounts the sort of man who got things done. You could say he was obsessed with ridding Glasgow of its slums, with turning them into something bright and high and unquestionably modern. That’s what he wanted, and he’d already made vast advances towards getting it when he became convener of Glasgow Corporation’s housing committee in 1964 ...”

“... the limitations of pure abstraction. A third text, The Perception of the Visual World (1950) by James J. Gibson, ‘a study of how motion affects a viewer in a three-dimensional space’, also played an important role in his art-making (Duchamp was interested in such questions too). During this period Hamilton spent many ...”

“... Museum, appeared in the Quarterly Review, which was published by Murray’s. The editor was John Gibson Lockhart, but we aren’t told why he chose to commission what was guaranteed to be a savage review. The Quarterly was founded by Murray II in 1809 when publishers’ operations in the last Georgian decades, if they were not as multifarious as in the first ...”

“... is at least 51 per cent image. In its worldly wisdom it resembles the first of its kind, John Gibson Lockhart’s pioneering five-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-8), though the drift of the two Lives is in opposite directions. Sutherland has come to bury Scott, while Lockhart, the great man’s son-in-law, praises him in a ...”

“... Students of the life and works of Walter Scott and James Hogg may have glimpsed the shadowy, not to say meteoric, not to say dubious presence of the publisher John Macrone, and learned of his prompt desire, after Scott’s death in September 1832, to write his Life, basing it to a large extent on rural informants ...”

“... from Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (very clearly a novel about conflict between species) to James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (surely the only novel ever to have been based on a thorough reading of George Gosse’s Omphalos, his totally discredited reconciliation of Darwin and the Book of Genesis). Yet the questions remain, are even stimulated by ...”

“... date of purchase. An Appendix to Kiessling’s new catalogue, which supersedes that of Strickland Gibson and F.R.D. Needham (1926), lists these former owners, along with others subsequently associated with Burton’s books. The introduction and description are admirably done. To historians, the peculiarly interesting thing about Burton’s library is not ...”

“... with Nintendo than H.G. Wells or Hugo Gernsback. But Banks does not (like the cyberpunk William Gibson) mock the great traditions of the genre; there are moments when Against a Dark Background, for instance, recalls the kitsch utopianism of Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series. Philip Marlowe used to solve chess problems – he would take on Capablanca on the ...”

“... of great men mattered, there was ‘little danger of our having too much autobiography’, John Gibson Lockhart, the Quarterly’s editor, protested in 1827. But now ‘England expects every driveller to do his Memorabilia.’ The democratisation of autobiography is one of the running themes of Adam Smyth’s revelatory history of the genre, from the ...”