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“... Most modern readers will never have heard of Beauties of Sterne, the Wit and Wisdom of Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot’s Sayings, or the Thomas Hardy Calendar, and the few who have actually looked inside such volumes will have done so only because the ‘real’ copy of the novel they were seeking had already been taken out of the library. Trained in a ...”

“... this would come to the surface in the form of wild applause for union-busting governors like Scott Walker of Wisconsin or Chris Christie of New Jersey. Imagine Nikki Haley’s joy when she saw the first Boeing built in South Carolina roll down the tarmac ‘surrounded by six thousand non-union employees’. That Monday night, after the protest, I met two ...”

“... meaning of the event enhances the power of the magic. The dialect is as authentic as anything in Scott and promotes the arresting strangeness. The text balances plain telling with charged saying. Its author expects the discourse to strike deep chords, though we may, if Scots and Yorkshire are unfamiliar in our ears, miss many of the resonances. The fantasy ...”

“... to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. X, whose name is revealed to be Ann Dykstra, has married a Republican architect named Charley O’Dell whom Frank despises, in part because he sees Republicans as ‘barely mentionable dickheads’. Paul has become a troubled adolescent – he’s been arrested for shoplifting and sometimes ...”

“... The novel did not invent such reality, but has developed its conjuration into a fine art. Think of Scott, virtually the founder of the great classic novel, and his unemphatic and impenetrable ability to seem to order and control experience, to give a self to history and to men and women in history. From this point of view, ...”

“... as it sounded so familiar, but it turns out the music was specially commissioned, from Julian Scott.) Montages of film clips play throughout on further screens, concocting essence of Hollywood in several flavours: romance, western, fantasy, history, sci-fi, thriller, noir. But the same costumes look very different on screen; the face, the gestures, and ...”

“... example, a Flash Mob of women at the Hobart factory, and the exciting times there as recalled by Ann Fisher, wardswoman: On Thursday night last Jane was my bed-fellow and during the night Eliza came to my bed and spoke to Jane and got into bed between us and [they] were talking some time together and at last [Eliza] asked [Jane] in language which no one ...”

“... work in another language; it may make their fortune: Anthea Bell (Englishing Sebald) and Ann Goldstein (voicing Elena Ferrante) propelled the authors to cult status beyond their own shores. Like a shrub moved to a sunnier position, writers may thrive when transplanted. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Human Acts have won startling numbers of readers ...”

“... 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 (on ...”

“... importance to a fictitious, quintessentially modern writer; a stanza in a recent volume by Carol Ann Duffy makes good use of an albatross and a crossbow. The final lines of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity leave its sympathetic narrator and his murderous female accomplice just about to dive, far out at sea, into the jaws of a helpful shark, the white-faced ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... song to the Gaelic image of Ossian, and from there to Burns in his Jacobite moments, Hogg, Scott, the Clearances and 19th-century sentiment. These are all part of the outsider’s view of Scottish identity, and the holding of this view inevitably affected the picture held by Scots of themselves. But to what degree? Pittock sustains his view with a ...”

“... and unpublic. But a great many women of the 18th century, including some like Mary Collier and Ann Yearsley who were poor, were heard of many miles from home. Roger Lonsdale gives us a collection of 95 poets (including a fair sprinkling of the inevitable ‘Anonymous’). With each new writer he offers densely packed informative headnotes. The biographies ...”

“... Union remained a threat. He bolted from Oxford – this time to marry his long-term girlfriend, Ann Sharp, the intelligent and artistic daughter of a raffish RAF war hero. The couple would have three boys. His father’s latest bankruptcy had left him penniless, so Cornwell taught for a while at Edgarley Hall, a prep school in Somerset, before going back to ...”

“... out on their bowling night’. A long way, Bech thinks, from Maxwell Perkins. Bech is like Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby, a minor sideline in fiction, to be relaxed with rather than worked at. But Updike nevertheless makes some sharp observations on current enemies of promise. And the whole set is enlivened by unrelenting bitchery. The rave notices of ...”