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“... but excitedly shameless (‘Ho, everyone that thirsteth’), or it can be the equivalent of George V’s sentiments on the subject (‘Shot? So quick, so clean an ending?). One wonders how its early readers could have mistaken the meaning of that poem, No 44 in A Shropshire Lad, or that of No 45 – ‘If it chance your eye offend you’ – but ...”

“... she finds, were met over and over again with an excessive response. From the execution of George William Gordon, a member of the Jamaican National Assembly, for allegedly inciting the 1865 rebellion at Morant Bay, to the conviction for conspiracy of the Meerut defendants in India in 1933 for organising a railway strike, the dynamic of rebellion and ...”

“... to withdrawal in Vietnam was meant to ‘neutralise’ supporters of the Southern Democrat George Wallace, who was trying to get the 1972 nomination. If Nixon pulled out too quickly, he warned, Wallace’s 13 per cent of the 1968 vote – he had run as an independent candidate on a segregationist ticket and split the right-wing vote – could balloon ...”

“... themselves at the mercy of some ruthless tribe of Iroquois or Sioux. Noting the success of Sir Walter Scott, from whose life and writing he learned so much, Cooper found in fiction a means of restoring his family’s fortunes. His most famous creation was the frontiersman Natty Bumppo, also known as Leatherstocking (on account of his leggings), Hawk-eye ...”

“... peacefully sails out to sea, leaving the city in its own quiet self-consuming hellishness. Sir Walter goes on for ever reading his own life in the Baronetage; William Walter Elliot is for ever defined as bad by the simple statement that too many people like him – he lives as social image. Like Henry James’s Madame ...”

“... of the Greta and the Tees on the Rokeby estate in Teesdale, thought to have been named by Walter Scott after the song of that title by the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Moore. This was then the only place I knew of so named. Next came a beautiful lake at Killarney which turned out to be called the Meeting of the Waters; again, it’s believed, at ...”

“... the documentary evidence is as sparse as it is for Shakespeare or as voluminous as it is for Sir Walter Scott, it can never be complete. Although some were destroyed and others censored by Cassandra Austen, we have many of the letters that Jane Austen wrote to this sister and a few she wrote to others. It is unlikely that any large body of the letters she ...”

“... smuggling and presented them to the French Convention. Lockhart attributes it to his father-in-law Walter Scott, but it now seems improbable. On the other hand, another much-cited episode of later the same year – that Burns joined in one or more demonstrations in the theatre at Dumfries in favour of the French and against King ...”

“... an establishment family he was reared in black industrial Walsall, where his father, rather like George Eliot’s Rev. Amos Barton, was a struggling clergyman in poor health. Both his parents died when he was hardly more than a child, but his mother’s connections had resources behind them and he was well-schooled and sent to Clifton, which he adored. As ...”

“... greatest hits loosely tied together with obiter dicta. In writing about Edgar Johnson’s Life of Walter Scott, for instance, in the New Yorker in 1971, he assembled a sequence of favoured exhibits. ‘Idiosyncrasies are always endearing, and Scott was not without them’; examples follow. Then, further down the same page: ‘The working habits of a writer ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”

“... what is it about starting a website that makes people think they have a lot in common with George Washington? – is now a not very funny comic wine columnist. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge is a period novel about Silicon Alley. Pynchon is fond of silly names, and in the dotcom bubble they seemed to be ...”

“... Meades lists the chemist’s shops and dowdy hotels of Salisbury, where he grew up: the Old George Inn (‘delightful’), The Crown (with ‘a swirly carpet’, owned by a fraudster called Cyril), The White Hart, The King’s Arms (‘lobster thermidor’). He lists the secret vices of this world – ‘winklepickers, illegitimacy, tinned ...”

“... to the closely observed loveliness of trees. As far back as the 12th century, the Yorkshire monk Walter Daniel described the surroundings of his beloved Rievaulx as ‘a second paradise of wooded delight’ where the ‘branches of lovely trees rustle and sing together’ over the tumbling waters of the river. Mabey’s essays, which begin from his own ...”

“... to be cut, pasted, amplified, modified and manipulated in a great number of ways. Fred Sanger and Walter Gilbert’s discovery in 1977 of methods for reading the sequence of DNA molecules raised the enticing possibility that the genetic ‘texts’ of living things might one day be read in their entirety. Indeed, in the same year, Sanger published the entire ...”