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“... the epoch in which humans have had a significant impact on the planet. In Against the Grain James Scott describes these early stages as a ‘“thin” Anthropocene’, but ever since, the Anthropocene has been getting thicker. New layers of human impact were added by the adoption of farming about ten thousand years ago, the invention of the steam engine ...”

“... Many people firmly believe there was. We owe the widespread belief that Robin lived in the time of Richard I (1157-1199) to William Stukeley (1687-1765), an eccentric scholar of ancient British history who fabricated for him a crazy family pedigree going back to the Normans. Knight argues that the search for the historical Robin is as quixotic as the search ...”

“... history of Shakespearean fiction is long and motley, like Feste’s coat. Arguably, it starts with Scott. Earlier tales about the Bard – his deer-poaching at Charlecote, the drinking bout at Bidford, holding horses at the theatre door – were fallacious rather than fictional. Starved of facts about the national poet, and eager to endorse the little that was ...”

“... J. Parnell Thomas, later jailed, and Joseph McCarthy, together with such men as John E. Rankin and Richard M. Nixon, posed as crusaders, hounding writers, actors, directors, and ordinary citizens whose political opinions were their only crime. The ensuing black list infected Hollywood like dry rot. The whole affair now looks like a pestilence, collective ...”

“... He discriminates between both periods and authors, drawing out the ‘passion for Heaven’ in Richard Baxter, the ‘clarity and assurance’ characteristic of Watts, Addison’s gentlemanliness, Charles Wesley’s ‘physicality’, Montgomery as ‘the greatest hymn-writer on the difficult subject of prayer’, the whisper and privacy in Keble’s ...”

“... The prosecution was conducted by a team of eight barristers led by the Attorney General, Sir John Scott. The defence team of five barristers included Erskine. On hearing of the extraordinary length of Scott’s opening address, the former Lord Chancellor Thurlow declared: ‘Nine hours? Then there is no treason, by ...”

“... was awaiting with natural concern: Lord Nolan’s first report on standards in public life and Sir Richard Scott’s report on the arms for Iraq affair. With the publication of the two reports the campaign has perceptibly died down. It prompts one particular reflection. The lobby system, by which any receptive journalists are fed government’s own ...”

“... are anything to go by, enormous fun.In his first year he met the violinist and musicologist Marion Scott. Gurney was 21, she was 34; the friendship, apparently platonic, would endure for the rest of his life. Scott was a formidable figure, among the first of Stanford’s female pupils and leader of her own quartet, but most ...”

“... lacked. ‘Airt, airt, what is it all about?’ he once exclaimed to the painter William Bell Scott. ‘If all art, except good portraits, faces of great men well done, if all art but these was swept out of the world we would be all the better!’ A passage in Ruskin’s autobiographical Praeterita, deleted when the book was in proof, vividly sums up the ...”

“... similar equalities for purposes of telephonic seduction, Tristan-esque trip-taking.’ Now comes Scott Hicks’s Shine, an equally arty but commercially viable biopic about a man – David Helfgott (played by Geoffrey Rush, Noah Taylor and Alex Rafalowicz) – who is abnormally inarticulate. Helfgott’s very first words are: ‘Kissed them all, I kissed ...”

“... It’s easy​ to see why Richard Tuttle’s work has a tendency to rile people – in particular people who insist on believing that sculpture, even if it no longer needs to be solid and substantial, should at least cling to material existence. From early on Tuttle seemed set on refusing such notions; his work came across as impromptu and elusive, a mirage of fragments, shadows and traces, portable, and hardly built to last ...”

“... between them and their often disparate specialities have never previously been explored. Walter Scott and Victor Hugo feature among the less familiar scholars, and some painters, including Bonnington and Delacroix, make brief appearances. As these names suggest, Hill has much to tell us about Anglo-French relations, present as well as past.We learn, for ...”

“... label the Routemaster an ‘icon’, a ‘classic’ that owes its chic to the styling of Douglas Scott, an industrial designer who also refashioned the Aga and the Rediffusion radio. That way, from a niche in the old-codgers’ corner of the heritage industry, the bus turns into an exhibit in the Design Museum. The truth is more edifying, if anyone out there ...”

“... Most loyal and protective of Gurney’s many friends, Marion Scott wrote after one of her regular visits to the asylum: ‘Ivor is so heart-breakingly sane in his insanity.’ Letters, reported conversation, music, poems all attest to the fact. He was trained and already admired as a composer before enlistment; in the trenches poetry had occupied him more and more and, when he returned afterwards to music, the poetry continued ...”

“... De Troy’s famous painting, The Reading from Molière illustrated on the dust-jacket of Katie Scott’s study of the rococo interior, seems to epitomise an ideal of polite but informal and mixed society which is still current. However, those who feel at ease with rococo furniture today do so because it is old and familiar. Originally it seemed novel and ...”