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“... the Civil War,’ she said. ‘But I do know that many historians, including Shelby Foote, in Ken Burns’s famous Civil War documentary, agree that a failure to compromise was a cause of the Civil War.’Sanders was right: Kelly’s comments could have come straight out of Burns’s documentary, which gave a ...”

“... is to be a fool, to kid ourselves, and try to think of courage.The Vietnam War, a film made by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, comes in ten parts, with beginnings, middles and end credits; and lasts 18 hours altogether, which some may feel is a lot to ask of busy, anxious wrecks who have their own troubles to patrol. Not that 18 hours on your ...”

“... as it has developed since the French Revolution, and been sated by offerings from Walter Scott to Ken Burns, Tolstoy to Margaret Mitchell, Hilary Mantel to Ben Pastor. Pastor seems to have invented a new way of combining the whole and the part in what TV producers might call the limited series.Yet it might chasten us to remember that as a result of our ...”

“... under a smudge of showbiz hype: they are particularly interested in his half-brother, Terry Burns, who was sent to Cane Hill, a Surrey asylum for the insane, and committed suicide. (Charles Chaplin’s mother also ended up in Cane Hill.) Thirdly, the Gillmans want to interpret Bowie’s lyrics. These three interests make for a long, probing book. The ...”

“... to the manipulations of one Mr Untermeyer, who seems dreamed up to answer the question, ‘What if Ken Burns were evil?’ The Speakers, as Mr Untermeyer calls them, hang on his Speaking Wall, pinioned in the shape of the letter X, and here they perform dramatic retellings of historical events for Mr U’s suburban dinner guests. In the modern mode, the ...”

“... Man. We might also point to Gregory Smith’s discussion of the so-called Editorial Theory about Burns. This theory sees the poet’s merit less in terms of his individual originality than in terms of his editing of given material. MacDiarmid’s oeuvre is a constant exploration of the tension between poet as creator and poet as editor. In his work, with its ...”

“... work is distinctive for its murdering mothers, not just Sethe in Beloved but also Eva in Sula, who burns her addict son to death. All that started early. It was there from the first. Long before Cholly’s rape of his daughter Pecola, the stakes within any given family are high.In her foreword to The Bluest Eye, Morrison writes that she wanted ‘to effect ...”

“... received opinions, particularly about the Forties and Fifties. We won’t find, for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish ...”

“... and yet, there was so much standardisation in 1960s Scottish girlhoods. Platignum Pens and the Burns Federation. Busy books, Francis Gay, Opportunity Knocks with Neil Reid. Dogs of all sorts, but mainly collies. Collies are the best. Chips fried in lard you’d leave to solidify for the next time, until it got so many ‘bits’ in it you had to throw it ...”

“... soon’, no’ sense, that faddoms the herts o’ men, And by my sangs the rouch auld Scots I ken E’en herts that ha’e nae Scots‘ll dirl richt thro’ As nocht else could – for here’s a language rings Wi’ datchie sesames, and names for nameless things. Dialect here becomes the true cosmopolitanism: if MacDiarmid is to be believed, it’s ...”

“... he died – on 15 December 1965 – while the Beatles were promoting Rubber Soul. A month earlier, Ken Tynan had said ‘fuck’ on TV. Maugham, by most accounts, had been saying it in public quite a lot as well. Meyers clearly works at great speed, and although his biography is better than it might be, there are times when it reads like an extended cuttings ...”

“... on hers about the virtue of the Republic and those, all those, who fought for it. Martha regarded Ken Loach’s movie, Land and Freedom, which tells the story of the betrayal of the POUM by the Communists, as an insult to the International Brigades. She poured scorn on the combat scenes (‘a joke’) and went on to dismiss Orwell, on which the film is a ...”

“... elegiac lyricism of drowning and summer afternoons here – gentle kaddish for the dead. Here it burns and hurts. It is violent, spasmodic, monstrous. There is no wholeness. I am not myself here. I can bear to stay here no longer.But there is a second thing, a second way in which Carol’s death is inside me – less exorbitant, a little more ...”