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“... to ‘W. Shakespeare’ or ‘M. Drayton’. At around the same time, what we call a ‘quotation mark’ (”), the descendant of the diplē (>), which had been used to mark notable passages in manuscripts, began to be used to mark sententiae, or memorable phrases, in vernacular ...”

“... and in many cases profitably cultivated its ignorance. The film has an epigraph supposedly from Mark Twain – ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so’ – and like all good epigraphs, it invites us to rework it a bit. The film suggests that you can get into trouble for ...”

“... How strange it is that the famous ius primae noctis, great horror of the Middle Ages to such as Mark Twain, should have been recorded only among the aggressively democratic Swiss cantons round Zürich (perhaps proving that nobody ever meant it seriously). But these accidental virtues are too often spoilt by a strange and generalising vagueness. ‘The ...”

“... America, of main streets, front yards, soft, riverine light: home to James Dean, Ronald Reagan and Mark Twain, three utterly dissimilar characters but emblematic for Tice of a certain idea of America. The images in Lincoln at first seem something else entirely. In fact, through these photographs of memorials of Abraham Lincoln in statuary and signage ...”

“... he made a point of instructing his students in those rare white American writers, such as Mark Twain, who had recognised that there could be no white American culture without black culture. (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson were both on his syllabus.) Rampersad also tells us that ‘Ralph deliberately set a framed ...”

“... big cities?’ It would not, of course, be a question meant to be taken seriously. Hardy, Gogol, Twain, Jane Austen, Synge, Hawthorne. But – it may as well be said at once – the adjective ‘great’ and its noun ‘greatness’ do occur too often in this otherwise wholly admirable book. Punches are pulled. Patent failures like the early Soldier’s Pay ...”

“... director’s obsequies is like interviewing a non-agenarian hick who witnessed the burial of, say, Mark Twain. So, Mr Biographer sir, what was Fassbinder’s funeral like? ‘It was the damnedest funeral you ever saw.’ What do you remember about it? ‘It was tough on the feet.’ And the atmosphere? ‘There was no champagne and beluga. Fassbinder ...”

“... are those people who have managed to relinquish the habit, so easy to relinquish, indeed, that Mark Twain did it frequently. That this predisposition to smoke is inheritable, rather than environmentally determined, is supported by the fact that the inclusion of a family-environmental effect in the model produces no changes in fit. One somewhat ...”

“... star appearances, but it’s the denizens of the place, their celebrity and sheer numbers – from Mark Twain through several generations of artists, cranks and druggies, to Sid Vicious – that warrant its reputation. Almost no one on the New York arts scene fails to put in an appearance in Tippins’s book, starting with William Dean Howells and Stephen ...”

“... through the generations. But what with the refusal of some writers to join the enterprise – Mark Twain was an early dropout – and the work schedule of others, the engenderer was compelled to get the family under way. No sooner had he done so, however, than he was upstaged by an ‘old-maid aunt’: a character whom Howells had originally ...”

“... wondered since who should be considered the presiding genius of the ‘turn’ – perhaps Mark Twain, who wrote a 60,000-word novel to lead up to the surprise in the last sentence. But even the greatest novelists, those who stand in the way of all subsequent comers and threaten them with bankruptcy, use it at times. Ulysses ends with the ...”

“... of a Changing Society in 19th-Century America’. Quotations from writers like Byron, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Emerson, Oscar Wilde, Louisa May Alcott, Turgenev and Tolstoy (lots of Tolstoy – no one has written more memorably about balls) precede each section and raise the intellectual tone. The format is coffee table and the style olden days: the text ...”

“... a tree, but he couldn’t teach you how to be a nigger.’ Foy Cheshire, a talkshow host, rewrites Mark Twain, replacing the ‘n-word’ with ‘warrior’, and the word ‘slave’ with ‘dark-skinned volunteer’, and comes up with The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young ...”

“... conceived in liberty is always an intellectual act for Lincoln,’ Wills writes – the italics mark the wish to overcome a violence that he never quite acknowledges as the necessary condition for the rebirth. Bringing new life to a text one would have thought had been exhausted by interpretation, Wills anatomises Lincoln’s self-aware magic with ...”

“... to a concerted marketing campaign, had fallen back to around 32,000.Having left his very visible mark, Abell moved on (to a senior role at the new Times Radio) in June this year, and Martin Ivens, former editor of the Sunday Times, was installed in his place. But it would appear that the paper is suffering from long-term health problems. Alan Jenkins, the ...”