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“... history repressed is more interesting than history expressed, as in the poetry of Southey, Scott, even Shelley. Besides, this historical foraging into the bad conscience of Wordsworth the ex-radical challenges the portrait of Wordsworth as counter-revolutionary which began to take shape around 1950, to be gradually developed by some of the leading ...”

“... front of his other loutish house guests. In the film, however (co-written, as it happens, by Allan Scott, who was also one of the writers on Don’t Look Now) this episode is infinitely more disturbing. The squire, nastily played by Kenneth Cranham, turns out to have a penchant not for gentle ribbing but for full-blown black magic rituals. Parson Adams is ...”

“... of all Hogarth’s extant portraits. Many of course are already very well known – Garrick as Richard III on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth, Garrick and his wife Eva-Maria Veigel, the painting known as The Shrimp Girl, the self-portrait of Hogarth with his unfortunately named pug Trump – but to see all the portraits together is a revelation, and ...”

“... sued, or serving as a witness. The law was proposed because the Supreme Court had ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that African Americans, free or enslaved, were racially ineligible for federal citizenship, and because many states had barred African Americans and other racial minorities from enjoying even the most rudimentary civil rights. Johnson ...”

“... off (or having) a nervous breakdown, and of her incipient relationship with the painter Robbie Scott-Duff (whose painting of her is on the cover of The Marble Mountain) – all in an inflationary style of uneasy melodramatic overstatement which veers between confession and self-justification. The tone sometimes becomes strenuously entertaining, as when ...”

“... they thought to displace. Interest in the English 1890s has naturally been growing of late. Richard Ellmann’s biography looked forward, emphasising the importance of Wilde as the martyred prophet of a new dispensation. Others have preferred to look back, finding in the poetry of the period a dilute version of the Symbolism of the Eighties. But John ...”

“... with women (‘Desdemona, before anything else, is A Woman’). There are also essays on Scott Fitzgerald, Twain, Emily Brontë, Stephen Crane, Traven’s The Death Ship, and of course Swift. It seems that no book concerned with the idea of the man of letters as man of action is nowadays complete without an essay or two on Swift: an honourable ...”

“... their divergences became more evident. McInerney achingly, almost poignantly, longed for the F. Scott Fitzgerald doomed glamour of extravagance and careless waste, raptures of the deep followed by hangovers of the damned. McInerney, you felt, craved critical and collegial approval, the respect of his peers and elders (he and Norman Mailer became friends), a ...”

“... describes this turn using the example of one British newspaper, beginning at the moment when C.P. Scott, its famous proprietor-editor, took up the Zionist cause. No one would now say, as Orwell did late in 1945, that the left was ‘strongly committed to support the Jews against the Arabs’, and a long memory is needed to recall the days when what Gerald ...”

“... hauls himself up over the final overhang – and collapses into a company of picnickers. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris motored up to his chosen summit a while ago; and here, sure enough, stepping forward to pat the newcomer on the back and welcome him along, who should it be but Philip Pullman? ‘Magnificent ...”

“... Gogh fields under troubled outpatient skies. The exhibition was hung in a refreshment room. Jennie Scott, the development officer, who wasn’t familiar with the earlier Duncan Grant, offered me a tour of the building, with its high, wood-panelled halls, judges’ thrones and trapdoors leading to basement cells where a Jack the Ripper suspect, William ...”

“... were thrown off the project, which was eventually built to a design by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Whatever its programmatic ‘complexity and contradiction’, as Venturi would put it, the Sainsbury Wing ‘looked’ to the casual eye like just another part of Trafalgar Square, all Corinthian columns and Portland stone. ABK never recovered, and ...”

“... successor agency, the CIA, away from the humdrum routine of intelligence-gathering towards action.Scott Anderson recounts the careers of four OSS agents whose underground war against the Axis turned into a crusade to ‘roll back’ communism in Eastern Europe and Asia. One was Frank Wisner, a corporate lawyer who enlisted to work in naval intelligence early ...”

“... 23 July 2002 surfaced in the Sunday Times detailing the conversations that the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, had with his counterparts in Washington. It contained the killer quote: ‘The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’ This confirmed, if confirmation were still needed, that Blair’s lie to the Commons was not a careless ...”

“... The week​ before he was fired from MGM, late in 1931, Scott Fitzgerald was having lunch with the screenwriter Dwight Taylor in the company canteen when something, or even two things, more disturbing than his own drunken dreams appeared and sat at his table. The apparition was a pair of Siamese twins. ‘One of them picked up the menu,’ Taylor remembered, ‘and, without even looking at the other asked: “What are you going to have?” Scott turned pea-green and, putting his hand to his mouth, rushed for the great outdoors ...”