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“... Molière, rebels with a subversive one and theatre historians with a man of the theatre. Virginia Scott’s biography, the first in English for seventy years, belongs with the latter tendency; its purpose is to provide an accessible portrait of a playwright who, after Shakespeare, ‘represents classical theatre to American audiences’. She ...”

“... and the Scrapbook, though it’s long been known that there was no such distinction. Margaret Scott, who is also co-editor of the five-volume Mansfield Collected Letters, has worked for years on these Mansfield papers at the Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand, where most of them are kept (the rest are in Chicago), and where she was a ...”

“... Country, Dickens’s London, With Hardy in Dorset, Literary Bypaths of Old England, The Land of Scott. Academic libraries don’t cater for it, and academic critics have about as much regard for it as they have for Disney World or back numbers of Reader’s Digest. It’s been out of favour since at least the 1750s. The Reverend Francis Gastrell, who owned ...”

“... practising the articulation of a very real gratitude. It would have been well understood by Walter Scott: Some things of the black dog hanging about me but I will shake him off. I generally affect good spirits in company of my family whether I am enjoying them or not. It is too severe to sadden the harmless mirth of others by suffering your causeless ...”

“... on her. By the time he joined the Confederacy in 1861, at the age of 54, he had become rebel Virginia’s pre-eminent silver fox; a British visitor encamped with his army the following year declared that Lee could pass for ‘a splendid specimen of an English gentleman’. Lee’s appearance attained a kind of perfection in defeat after he surrendered ...”

“... of Guermantes, the narrator says, ‘appeared to me to be a paradise I would never enter’. Scott Moncrieff, the earlier and best-known translator of Proust, is in this case quite literal about the famous sentence, and gives us ‘the true paradises are the paradises that we have lost,’ although even here there is a little slither, since in the ...”

“... Vita was 40: Christopher, Mrs Glendinning writes, was ‘very ugly and in her late fifties’. (Virginia Woolf, called upon to intercede with Vita on Christopher’s behalf, described her as ‘that mule-faced harridan of yours’.) Vita didn’t drop Christopher: she liked people to go on loving her, provided they didn’t expect much in return, and ...”

“... To read Virginia Woolf when young is, or was, to have the feeling of entering a new world, to realise with sudden ecstasy that this was true being, where words and consciousness and the solitary self melted into one. ‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,’ wrote Wordsworth of his sister Dorothy. Virginia Woolf gave more than that: she gave, or seemed to give, the pure Private Life, quite separate from the contingent miseries, anxieties and rivalries of adolescence, a free-floating poetic awareness, an otherness wholly and excitingly up-to-date ...”

“... World and Me, his essay on race and violence. Coates’s close friend Prince Jones was killed in Virginia in 2000. ‘When Prince Jones died, there were no cameras. There was nobody looking. The officer that killed him was not prosecuted. He was not even disciplined by the police force.’ In the Cincinnati video, today’s compulsion to take pictures of ...”

“... by a previous marriage on a motor-tour of Tuscany. The choice fell on Maynard Keynes and Geoffrey Scott, who proved to be ‘nice, intellectual boys’ who did not lead the girls into any ‘nonsense’. Scott was recently down from Oxford, with a reputation as a brilliant conversationalist but no obvious vocation, and Mary ...”

“... books, like her journalism, are larded with quotations, from recherché antique cookery books to Virginia Woolf, Montaigne, Walter Scott. Her approach is not in the least like the gastronomic dandyism of the ‘food-for-food’s sake’ crowd: she is holistic about it. She is obviously a truly civilised person and, for ...”

“... and the tedium of diplomatic society is transformed and magnified in the violent subjection of Virginia in The Chandelier (1946), one of her most difficult books in its search for an originary language, stripped of accretions. As Moser puts it, ‘she identifies the point at which a thing is named as the point where that thing comes to exist.’ It is one ...”

“... periodical, the New Age, and to meet Scottish intellectuals including the composer Francis George Scott (to whom Hugh MacDiarmid would dedicate A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle) and a French lecturer at Glasgow University called Denis Saurat (who is often credited with giving the 1920s Scottish literary renaissance its name). Most important, ‘in the early ...”

“... must have come partly from having an illegitimate child, excruciatingly humiliating in her day. Virginia Woolf, another sharp-eyed lady, wrote that all West’s difficulty came from ‘the weals and scars left by the hoofmarks of Wells’. (She also had comments about dirty nails and so on; Rebecca, for her part, would not ‘have fed a dog’ from one of ...”

“... she could dance at a club called Ritzy Ray’s. That might have been the place she met Colonel Scott, a small-time local con artist who made his dimes collecting tolls from drivers crossing a free bridge. When Kathleen got pregnant, Scott told her he’d been summoned away on military business. In fact, he was a civilian ...”