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“... Students of the life and works of Walter Scott and James Hogg may have glimpsed the shadowy, not to say meteoric, not to say dubious presence of the publisher John Macrone, and learned of his prompt desire, after Scott’s death in September 1832, to write his Life, basing it to a large extent on rural informants ...”

“... the first of its kind, John Gibson Lockhart’s pioneering five-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-8), though the drift of the two Lives is in opposite directions. Sutherland has come to bury Scott, while Lockhart, the great man’s son-in-law, praises him in a public-relations exercise calculated to maintain the family’s prestige and ...”

“... A family on the throne,’ observed Walter Bagehot, in one of those honeyed phrases which may mean more or less than they seem to, ‘is an interesting idea.’ Indeed, it is. But during the past two hundred years of British royal history, it is an idea which has embodied itself in two very different human forms ...”

“... produced in Venice around 1527. The unique surviving copy of this edition was found in 1928 by Walter Toscanini, son of the conductor. The pages of this book, the de Waldeck drawings, the British Museum fragments, and translations of the sonnets, are all included in Lawner’s book. A foreword by George Szabo relates the ...”

“... disparate novels could hardly be imagined than Middlemarch and The Brothers Ashkenazi: but both George Eliot and Joshua Singer believed that life was rationally intelligible and could be mirrored in rational form. Bashevis does not share this faith. His novels and stories teem with ghosts, demons and hallucinations; his characters are driven by forces that ...”

“... called You Are There. The pretence was that a reporter, who in my mistaken memory was always Walter Cronkite, would be on hand as a historical event unfolded. No matter what the century, the reporters were from the 1950s, with notepads or microphone in hand. ‘General Washington, General Washington,’ Mr Cronkite would call to ...”

“... both English and American criticism altogether, and to return to Schlegel’s homeland and to Walter Benjamin. The heart of the book lies not in the chapter about Benjamin, however, but in the programmatic chapter called ‘Literary Commentary as Literature’, in which in a handful of brilliant pages Hartman links Lukacs’s early essay on the essay form ...”

“... soft rounded contour of a feminine breast’. The ‘subtler threads of temperament’ that Walter Pater had adduced in Winckelmann’s Hellenism were more than hinted at in works like Walter Crane’s The Renaissance of Venus (1877), where the goddess is in most physical respects, as writer and artist W. Graham ...”

“... Weekly Magazine, and a collection of nearly forty of them had been brought out in 1773 by Walter Ruddiman, the magazine’s publisher. Fergusson was never able to complete the long works he envisaged: he apparently had it in mind to translate Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics. He abandoned a (now lost) dramatic tragedy about William Wallace after two ...”

“... he expanded and elucidated Virgil, his translation left nothing out. Royle is right to mention Sir George MacKenzie of Rosehaugh as ‘one of the few intellectual giants of his day’ – ‘that noble wit of Scotland’, as Dryden called him – but he might have told us that his Aretina (1660) was the first novel by a Scotsman (and he mght have mentioned Sir ...”

“... in it are not political but intellectual and cultural. The word today suggests the Bauhaus, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Walter Benjamin, the great photographer August Sander and a number of remarkable movies. Weitz picks out six names: Thomas Mann, Brecht, Kurt Weill, Heidegger and the less familiar theorist Siegfried ...”

“... The title ‘Prime Minister of Mirth’ was awarded not to Major but to the music-hall comic George Robey, with his red nose and half-moon eyebrows. The two men have little in common beyond their right-wing views. It is true that many actors spring to life only when they step on stage. Yet one could be forgiven for thinking that even a couple of ...”

“... the early Hanoverians, the British monarchy first seriously embraced good works during the time of George III, who in this as much else was the father and founder of modern royalty. He allowed his name to be associated with many new philanthropic ventures, especially London hospitals, and personally gave £14,000 a year to good causes, which makes him, in ...”

“... Sea, while bringing a Norwegian princess to marry the Scottish king. In the version transcribed by Walter Scott, one of the stanzas runs:Be it wind, be it weet, be it hail, be it sleet,Our ship must sail the faem;The king’s daughter of Noroway,’Tis we maun fetch her hame.Williamson relates this to Borges’s obsession with his long-lost love Norah ...”

“... from The Grocery Shop by Gerrit Dou (1613-75), now in the Queen’s Collection – bought by George IV for 1000 guineas in 1817. Dou’s reputation (and prices) were then still high. He gave tremendous value. He attended closely to the play of light as it came through a window or was thrown out by a candle. He rendered the textures of wood, metal, fabric ...”