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“... considering who was listening as well as who was speaking, Rosenbaum’s outline, supported by James Haule’s editorial framework, puts together an interesting picture. One account of the club’s origins has it that Molly MacCarthy wanted to find a way of forcing her husband, an incorrigible procrastinator, to produce something. On this front it was a ...”

“... wasn’t written by Hilary Mantel or Antonia Fraser. It was written more than 140 years ago by James Anthony Froude, whose History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada put the Tudor show on the road. That wasn’t Froude’s only legacy. His Life of Carlyle, published in 1885, inaugurated modern biography, biography with ...”

“... rewarded by John with lands. Under Henry III he continued to prosper and became a baron. His son James (c.1220-77) was a royalist too in the Barons’ Wars and became Justiciar of Ireland in 1270. Two of his sons had descendants, the elder was the ancestor of the baronial family of Audeley of Heleigh Castle, Staffordshire ...”

“... and the ‘autographic sequel’, which is not an imitation but a prolongation – like Walter Scott’s or James Fenimore Cooper’s novel cycles, or Balzac’s Human Comedy. Both types are tied to market forces. Collections like To Be Continued: An Annotated Guide to Sequels (1995) and The Whole Story: 3000 Years of ...”

“... Great unknowns, pen names and spoof attributions figure centrally in the genre’s history, from Scott, to George Eliot, to Kilgore Trout. According to the massive, nine-volume Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature there are, largely speaking, only three reasons for masked authorship, all prudential: ‘Generally the motive is some form ...”

“... Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence [sic] Sterne; generosity indeed to double the number!’ A list so nakedly daft obviates ...”

“... club, Summertown Stars, and sent me to the local Church of England school, St Philip and St James. I was already a competitive, sport-obsessed child, and responded to the sense of cultural difference by exaggerating it. During a classroom discussion – I can’t remember about what exactly – I quoted the great Green Bay Packers football coach, Vince ...”

“... through Scotland in the 18th century – the transformation was so swift and profound that Walter Scott could reckon in Waverley (1814) that no European nation could match it: the Scots had become ‘as different from their grandfathers as the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth’s time’. In other words, the forces of ...”

“... experiences and good ideas, to help produce rolling coverage. Readers would become collaborators, co-workers, contributors – unpaid, of course. On 29 February 2012, a new one-minute commercial for the Guardian was aired for the first time. The idea was to promote Rusbridger’s belief in ‘open journalism’, the theory that a digital news organisation’s ...”

“... bourgeois, a Wilcox rather than a Schlegel or even a Leonard Bast. Or so it can easily seem. James Gindin, however, seeing the case in quite another light, challengingly subtitles his biography ‘An Alien’s Fortress’ and suggests at the outset that, despite appearances, Galsworthy had his full share of the discontent and the divided mind needed to ...”

“... Midwich Cuckoos adaptation Village of the Damned; the BBC’s Dead of Night series and its M.R. James Christmas ghost stories; Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital. In a way, Young is writing a new history of British film and television, an alternative to the more respectable version that has tended to focus on Loach and Leigh, Powell ...”

“... and keeping the maximum number of plates spinning with flicks of punctuation. It would do Henry James’s vision more violence to translate his books into an English deprived of intermediate stops than to render them in a comma-rich Esperanto. The novels of Proust and Mann would lose much of their intellectual flavour if commas were rationed. Céline took ...”

“... Justice rival ancient ROME;/Let NERO’s Vices meet with NERO’s Doom,/And speed’ly call King JAMES from Exile Home.’ Cookson spent a winter in Newgate Prison.Using a loathed historical or literary figure as a stand-in for an unpopular contemporary one was a favourite trick of early modern writers who wanted to print sedition and get away with it ...”

“... in the chronicles of biological discovery, does not rank in glamour with the exploits of Captain Scott and Sir Edmund Hillary. Hydrozoa are commonly known as jellyfish, and Huxley seems to have devoted a lot of time in the 1840s to examining the interior workings of tapeworms (cestodes, or endoparasitic platyelmia). Hard to make a bestseller out of ...”

“... Virgin Mary. Even the joust made a stylised come-back. In the 1840s, on the present-day site of James Stirling’s Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. Swabian aristocrats dressed up as crusading knights and Saracens to stage a tourney using original weapons, complete with pages, squires and a back-drop of lemon trees especially imported for the occasion. This was ...”