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“... the summer of 1862, when a seemingly imminent Union victory was arrested both in the West and in Virginia. It may be remarked here, hardly parenthetically, that the prolongation of the war by these Southern successes ensured that the war would turn into a crusade against slavery. An early victory would have restored the Union without any immediate prospect ...”

“... of the erratic, often inebriated behaviour of Carson McCullers, a literary prodigy to set beside Scott Fitzgerald in the previous generation. (McCullers, married to a bisexual man, was frequently enamoured of women who sometimes, but more often didn’t, welcome her effusive advances.) Of the trio, Flannery O’Connor, who published her first novel Wise ...”

“... and Henry Green are his contemporaries at Oxford; he takes tea with Ottoline Morrell and twits Virginia Woolf. Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh are London acquaintances. Picasso sketches his portrait, Hemingway is a fellow war correspondent, and Paris brings a meeting with James Joyce. His wartime boss at Naval Intelligence is, of course, Ian Fleming, who ...”

“... it ‘a covenant with death, an agreement with hell’. Three years later, in the case of Dred Scott, Chief Justice Roger Taney vindicated Calhoun (and Garrison) by declaring that blacks formed no part of the ‘people’ who had formed the Constitution. They could never be citizens of the nation and ‘had no rights which the white man was bound to ...”

“... it took her forty years to do so. Born in 1873 among the lush hills and greenery of Winchester, Virginia, to a feckless gentleman farmer and his beautiful Southern belle wife, she was removed from the landscape she loved at the age of nine, when the family moved to the harsh, flat, frozen prairie town of Red Cloud, Nebraska. This, the first rude trauma of ...”

“... 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, ...”

“... domestic and sexual permutations would have caused no consternation among listeners who included Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell. Nor, perhaps, would Forster’s own discomfort with the question of Sex, which played a large, complicated part in his own life: ‘You work it out,’ his essay goes on: ‘I can’t so well.’ Increasingly anguished ...”

“... known as the Tulsa Race Massacre – is a central theme of The Ground Breaking, a riveting book by Scott Ellsworth, who has spent most of his adult life piecing together the story of perhaps the deadliest instance of racial violence in the country’s history. (I say perhaps because the exact number of victims remains unknown.)Ellsworth, who teaches at the ...”

“... wars on pointless subjects; straight-faced manuals of advice on behaving badly. For Walter Scott, his shrewdest 19th-century reader, Swift ‘possessed the faculty of transfusing his own soul into the body of anyone whom he selected’. His lifelong preference was to write under assumed identities – Isaac Bickerstaff or Lemuel Gulliver; the bumptious ...”

“... of novels by others. They are Henry James’s The Awkward Age, E.M. Forster’s Howards End and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, together with two modern attempts to imitate Austen’s Regency English, Georgette Heyer’s Frederica and the continuation of ‘Sanditon’ by Another Lady. He conducts some tests comparing the idiolects of the leading characters ...”

“... pleasure. But Mackenzie’s influence at the time was far greater, and it was international. Both Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson were fascinated by him: the lush vivacity of his prose not only animates the former’s early novels (intended to be ‘intellectual’ like H.G. Wells, ‘and improper like Compton Mackenzie’), but is just as evident in the ...”

“... of Yale. But it was the man himself, sitting on the edge of an overstuffed club chair, pulling a Virginia Slim from a cigarette packet, that really left an impression. No man was ever more deliberate, from the way he lit and held that cigarette, and followed it with another, to the cock of his head and the play of his eyebrows and his wide mouth, which said ...”

“... young man reacts more dramatically, by hurling half the books to the floor. In Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf someone else gives vent to their frustration with literature by drawing breasts on a photograph of Virginia Woolf and kitting out E.M. Forster with a big cigar. Orton himself notoriously defaced library books ...”

“... that recurs in the novels and Gibbon often recalls Old Mortality, the crazed Cameronian in Scott’s novel who haunted the area’s churchyards, devoting his life to the sisyphean task of keeping legible the mossed-over memorials to the Covenanter martyrs of 1685. Gibbon, in one of his many parts an expert archaeologist, has a similar devotion to old ...”

“... everyone he met. He was painted by Duncan Grant and gushingly admired by Lytton Strachey, while Virginia Woolf thought he had ‘a head like a Greek god’. He performed in plays alongside Rupert Brooke and was the model for George Emerson in Forster’s A Room with a View. And he was a great rock climber, perhaps the best. He missed the first year of the ...”