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“... from lawyers arriving every day. It was probably the worst time of my life.’ Cornwell agreed to co-operate with Sisman after reading his last book, a Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper. In an intriguingly cagey introduction, Sisman describes the resulting deal. Cornwell would give him long interviews, access to his archives, and a list of introductions. ‘I was to ...”

“... includes an exciting shoot-out at Grinev’s estate. Elements of the story are indebted to Walter Scott, but the bucking adventurism is closer to Fenimore Cooper (whom Pushkin was reading at the time). Pushkin had great difficulty extending his fictional prose. He had wanted to turn ‘The Blackamoor of Peter the Great’ into a novel (a fictionalised ...”

“... public is curiously subtle. Thomas Mann and Arnold Bennett would have taken it for granted, like Scott, that though their reconstructions might not appeal to everyone, they would be read by a complete cross-section of the reading public, from the discerning connoisseur to those who were getting something out of the lending library. In the same way, the ...”

“... skilfully retaining all its traditional apparatus. Stendhal’s imagination is a kind of parody of Scott’s: his sensibility is itself its own journal and his own memoir. Reviewing Stendhal’s last book, The Charterhouse of Parma, when it appeared in 1839, Balzac noted admiringly that the novel ‘often contained a whole book in a single page’. But that ...”

“... lacked. ‘Airt, airt, what is it all about?’ he once exclaimed to the painter William Bell Scott. ‘If all art, except good portraits, faces of great men well done, if all art but these was swept out of the world we would be all the better!’ A passage in Ruskin’s autobiographical Praeterita, deleted when the book was in proof, vividly sums up the ...”

“... Thus his paintings are mostly a computer-assisted updating of Pop and Surrealism, equal parts James Rosenquist and Salvador Dalí (his first love), and the sculptures that mash up pop-cultural figures like Elvis and Hulk are also usually overdone. So, too, Koons often fails to inflect the three categories that are his bread and butter – kitsch, porn and ...”

“... in virtue, may get travestied by the inwardly vicious. Everyone also suspects himself, as Scott Fitzgerald noted, of possessing at least one cardinal virtue. Where politicians continually have to flatter a demos that sees them as clay-footed, each citizen, banjaxed and blandished by turns, is apt to divine in himself a moral purity his political ...”

“... of various family members. His exploration of the hitherto obscure roles of Cassandra and of James, the eldest brother, is one of his best discoveries. In the years in which Jane was at last getting published, Cassandra can already be seen as a family watchdog. When Sense and Sensibility emerged in 1811, Cassandra begged everyone to keep Jane’s ...”

“... candidates for the roles of Brünnhilde and Siegfried, Tristan and Isolde, or Elektra: but now, as James Levine, the artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, has notoriously complained, it is very hard to assemble a cast even for Aida. Nobody quite knows why this should be so: it could be the fault of teaching, it could be the merest freak of ...”

“... Richard Pare collection, Photography and Architecture 1839-1939)? Photography would then be co-operating in the actual construction of the newer buildings, angling into dimensions of built space that our ordinary human bodies have little daily commerce with, combining planes we normally separate in dramatic visual ‘chords’, and absorbing the signs ...”

“... Once certain authors acquired ‘classic’ status, they were not easily displaced. Defoe, Swift, Scott, Dickens, Hardy figure in almost every story of a life transformed by reading, along with the major poets (Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson), dramatists (none matched Shakespeare and Shaw in popularity), discursive prose writers (Carlyle and Ruskin are the ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J ...”

“... income, often felt they had to wait until they were better off. Some went ahead anyway. John Scott – a future lord chancellor, but in 1772 a 21-year-old Oxford student with vague plans to pursue a career in the church or at the bar – had no money to speak of and few prospects, and wasn’t at all the kind of son-in-law his sweetheart Elizabeth’s ...”

“... modest critical success and further novels followed: Barham Downs (1784), The Fair Syrian (1787), James Wallace (1788), Man as He Is (1792) and finally Hermsprong. Bage told Godwin that he believed ‘he should not have written novels, but for want of books to assist him in any other literary undertaking.’ Not that the reluctant novelist was uneducated. In ...”

“... and hunting trophies – were jam-packed in warehouses all over London. Burroughs Wellcome & Co, the business that paid for this magnificent trove of historical bric-à-brac, sold malt extract, cod liver oil, cocaine and other dietary supplements in the novel form of compressed tablets (their cocaine pills, labelled ‘Forced March’, were ‘to be ...”