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“... to win a living by his pen. He was a fine translator as well as writer, and brought some works of Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel into English. Only a paltry nickel-and-dime dispute lost him the commission to complete Scott-Moncrieff’s version of A la recherche du temps perdu. (As you reel from this thought, reflect that ...”

“... an age of biography, and flowed into other literary forms in abundance, taking over the novel of Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, the poetry of Browning. The same curiosity about people and their relationships, possessions and environment is an academic subject now, called social anthropology. For the older reader and indeed the older critic, time has stood ...”

“... of literary fraud. One of his first publications, Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782), takes sixty exhaustive pages to demolish those who still believed that Chatterton’s poems were genuinely medieval, and his edition of Shakespeare devotes thirty more to discrediting a feeble pseudo-Jacobean pamphlet published forty years ...”

“... Thesaurus of the Northern languages, but again did not pick up popularity till after Walter Scott. ‘Valkyries’ were introduced to English by Gray in 1768, closely followed by Percy’s translation of the Swiss professor Paul-Henri Mallet’s Monuments de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves. But ...”

“... of O’Connor’s women seem to have forgiven and indeed to have continued to love him. Even Maria Scott, who never saw him again after he left her and their children because she thought ‘he’d say something so awful, so destructive,’ missed him. ‘Philip spoilt me for other men,’ she told Barrow. Something of that state of mind was harshly illuminated ...”

“... speech, and singleness of eye. So the Tudors had been left to poets and novelists – Schiller, Scott, Southey – and the French historian François Mignet, whose highly romanticised Histoire de Marie Stuart appeared in 1851. British historians wrote about ancient Greece and Rome, the Italian Renaissance, and Anglo-Saxon and post-Reformation England. The ...”

“... more dirtily, as befitted the scruffy student I had become, from the Trystero conspiracy in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. One gets it less, though, as one gets older. You know too much about how the world works to be so easily taken in.The way the books are marketed only confuses the boundaries further. My own three-volume paperback has the ...”

“... and Sidmouth. There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George ...”

“... or Beyoncé popular; but neither is she some divisive figure out on the blasted perimeter, like Scott Walker. Devoted fans prize her as one of our culture’s great ungovernable Outsiders. This fan club includes the grandees of the French establishment, who in 2005 named her a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, making Smith about as much of an ...”

“... station, bearing leaflets, carrying messages as proudly as the freshly baked loaves in Ridley Scott’s celebrated commercial, shot in 1973, on the picturesque slopes of Shaftesbury. Carl Barlow, the youth who featured in the advertisement, underscored by the slow movement of Dvorak’s Symphony No 9, arranged for brass, went on to become a fireman in ...”

“... death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since ...”

“... scrutiny.’ Of course, it would be something of a thankless task to try to displace the beloved Scott Moncrieff translation, with which she developed a happy relationship. The most surprising revelation here is Davis’s admission that she had never read À la recherche du temps perdu, only managing to get two-thirds of the way through the first book when ...”

“... celebrities ‘dress to kill’. And some of the words that appear on blocklists are surprising. Scott Gatz, of the LGBTQ-oriented US electronic publisher Q.Digital, tells me that one big advertiser entered into a direct deal with it to advertise alongside its Pride coverage, but no ads then appeared on Q.Digital’s websites. He asked to see the blocklist ...”

“... dying girl, ‘what was I born into the world at all for?’‘If a way to the better there be,’ Thomas Hardy wrote, ‘it exacts a full look at the worst,’ and there’s an echo of Tess of the D’Urbervilles in what happens to Phemy: the President of the Immortals has his sport with her. At times Coppard’s worst is even bleaker than Hardy’s. Hence ...”

“... back there, and I knew it just didn’t exist any more.’ The phrase picks up old slogans from Thomas Wolfe (‘You can’t go home again’) and Scott Fitzgerald (‘“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried, incredulously. “Why, of course you can”’), but it also adds its own, Vietnam-nourished insight. Willard has ...”