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“... which he sees towards dawn from his window, of a disembodied hand travelling tirelessly across the page: no ghost story, but the neat framing of Scott’s life in terms of the homely myth of the Industrious Apprentice. In a series of transformations Lockhart’s Scott becomes both the Wizard of the North and the rich Laird of Abbotsford, graced with titles ...”

“... overdog? Was his sense of underdogdom a Muslim thing, rather than a British thing? Begg confounds Norman Tebbit’s test of Englishness by backing the Pakistan cricket team when it plays in England, but the English team when it plays in Pakistan. On his release, he took his family on outings to Warwick Castle, Sherwood Forest and Snowdonia. ‘From the days ...”

“... hard at work on what he anticipated as his masterpiece, a tragedy called Death of Guiscard, the Norman. He hoped the play would revolutionise contemporary theatre, transcend Shakespeare and ‘tear the wreath off’ Goethe’s head. It’s not surprising that he couldn’t finish it. After struggling with Guiscard for five hundred days and nights, he ...”

“... with dictionary-highbrow. Buthlay’s edition prints the text of A Drunk Man on the left-hand page and many of its source materials on right-hand pages. This arrangement allows us to see clearly how MacDiarmid in the poem achieves choral, typically Modernist effects. A good instance is seen when Buthlay places a verse of MacDiarmid’s host-text (an ...”

“... amenable to an endless number of imposed plots (topographically, it seemed to be the blank page willing to tolerate innumerable inscriptions). But it was not an emptiness. As it transpired, those ‘virgin lands’ turned out to be full of all kinds of traces and even plots (or apparently disturbing configurations of intent). It is entirely appropriate ...”

“... and Latino teenagers were arrested for raping a white woman in Central Park, Donald paid for full-page advertisements in New York newspapers, demanding the boys’ execution. When they were exonerated, he wouldn’t apologise: ‘Tell me, what were they doing in the park, playing checkers?’ Donald seems to have admired everything about his father except for ...”

“... fondue said ‘suburbia’ as loudly as if the word itself had been printed as a date-line on the page. As Alison Clarke explains in Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America, Tupperware was invented by Earl Silas Tupper, an amateur inventor who was an employee of a Massachusetts plastics firm before starting his own company in 1939. Around ...”

“... Select ... I write best when I weep’), the inimitable Burroughs and the indescribably awful Norman Mailer, who used his evenings in Paris with black jazz players to sketch a model of the New York anti-hero, the Hipster, who was ‘to be considered a white Negro’. Baldwin later wrote (in masterly understatement): ‘I could not, with the best will in ...”

“... who produced almost sixty romances and novels, wanted to be something more than a writer of page-turners. He wanted to serve his country in a high-minded volunteer way. ‘I believe that public service is my true line,’ he wrote. ‘All the rest are side shows.’ After King Solomon’s Mines and She had made him rich and famous, he devoted himself ...”

“... diaries, he is building on Mallarmé, who was before him in seeing the white and virgin unwritten page as a snowfield. But he goes beyond the Frenchman, for in Graham’s snowfield there are crevasses. A writer’s language has its way with him. A lot turns on how he reacts to this condition, once it is brought home to him. Graham’s attitude is light years ...”

“... five nights a week’ on TV. Their house was the place for parties, where guests included Norman Mailer and Spotted Eagle, a Native American chief who liked ‘radical-chic pussy’. Still, the Sixties didn’t do the Ayer-Wells marriage much good: Dee increasingly saw Freddie as an ‘uptight old fart’ and he thought her ‘a loudmouthed ...”

“... Court. It was all the fault of the monarchy which – in a Gallic equivalent of the idea of the ‘Norman Yoke’ so popular among British radicals – had effaced an older, graver and more rugged, but above all more authentic French character. This fitted in very well with Rousseau’s contention that primitive human goodness had been corrupted by the advance ...”

“... of its previous modest column of recipes and restaurant reviews, the paper now boasts an entire page devoted to food and wine once a week: more space than it gives to movies, as much as it customarily gives to books. Piggery has spawned a glossy bimonthly, A la Carte, a gastronomic Penthouse devoted to glamour photography, the subject of which is not the ...”

“... dialogue and behaviour that goes with it: one repeatedly has the sense that inside this 399-page novel about a serial killer, a 120-page novella about spoilt rich kids in New York is wildly signalling to be let out. (The zonked anomie of these characters is exactly the same as the zonked anomie that everyone displayed ...”

“... parallel English translations. O’Brien is more Anglocentric: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is in facing-page English, but Sorley MacLean and Iain Crichton Smith, for example, occur only in English, and there is no Welsh-language poetry at all. On the other hand, O’Brien’s selection of English-language poetry casts a wider and more ambitious net. ‘Even as we ...”