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“... 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 George – must be substantially true ...”

“... suggests otherwise. Long before I met him, Peter was intrigued and outraged at the hanging of James Hanratty for the 1961 A6 murder. When I took the case up in the late Sixties he bombarded me with questions and offers of support. Sometime in 1978 I asked him if he would give away the prizes and draw the raffle at an Anti-Nazi League fête in North ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... history, which extended citizenship and basic legal rights to blacks, overturning the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857 which had insisted that only white persons could be citizens of the United States. Johnson vetoed both bills. This was the start of an increasingly acrimonious conflict with Congress, in which, Wineapple writes, Johnson ...”

“... gains a hold. That is or should be the virtue of the business, as if the reader were helping – co-operating – in keeping the thing going, the writers existent. The reader is flattered to be participating, but he also gloats: his own share continues, whereas theirs is over. They have been abandoned by the words with which they gained a hold over the ...”

“... unable to spot the cop in their midst. True Romance, Tarantino’s first script, directed by Tony Scott and released in 1993, has a big drug deal that ends in a massacre because too many people show up at the party. There is a marvellous three-way stand-off here – drug-buyer’s bodyguards against cops against Mafia – which is repeated in Reservoir Dogs ...”

“... appeared in little magazines, the incessant reader (even on safari), the recipient, like Henry James, of an obscure wound that kept him from the war. Were his stories full of ‘action’ or of ‘love’? Did he sympathise with men or with women? Was he more interested in plot or in character? What did he mean by ‘style’: the way a matador moved in a ...”

“... to ‘British and Irish Authors’, a high-quality series which includes Patrick Parrinder on James Joyce and John Batchelor on H.G. Wells. Barnard gets a great deal into his short book, presenting a rather different Keats from that of the many other Keats scholars and biographers. Keats’s vividness has been present to his admirers in many forms. In ...”

“... ages. In the course of this account Kafka is shown to anticipate Sartre’s protest in Qu’est-ce que la littérature? of 1948 against the finished, fully rounded story and the omniscient narrator who makes such an ending possible and thus falsifies (Sartre argues) ‘what happens in real life’. Following the chronology of Kafka’s stories (he leaves ...”

“... once-great names with scant ceremony, interpreting Fielding as too like his own Squire Western, Scott as a mere Border balladeer. Richardson and Dickens, though allowed some merit, were kept out of the limelight. Even within the oeuvres of the favoured George Eliot, James and Conrad, Leavis went in for a further process ...”

“... doesn’t give a toss what you think.’ The current editor, Stuart Higgins, is a champion of Sir James Goldsmith’s campaign for a referendum on Europe, the only true expression of the people’s will. Along with other Tory papers, the Sun goaded Major into taking a tougher line on the British beef ban, and, when he did, the paper celebrated: MAJOR SHOWS ...”

“... new demand caught him between wind and water: he was ‘more disposed’ anyway, as he told Walter Scott, ‘to instruct & admonish mankind than to amuse them’. One might pardon the versatility if only it pardoned itself less copiously; but Southey always had an exceptional gift for ingratiating himself with himself. ‘I have a trick of thinking too well of ...”

“... Act, which was intended to discourage ‘white slavers’ driving women across a state line, see Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise). In many American hotels the rule was that a man should never entertain a woman in his room without leaving the door open, even if the woman was his aunt or his grandmother. If he failed to comply his telephone would ...”

“... of the first two volumes of his great History of England, published in 1848, rivalled those of Scott and Dickens. The main reason for his popularity, apart from his literary style, was that he flattered the English by crediting them with a unique history of evolving ‘freedom’. Hall thinks – what might at first glance appear paradoxical – that he ...”

“... between Filippo Lippi and a nun in Renaissance Florence, and the third the lurid career of Henry James Prince, a Victorian priest who founded a sect called the Agapemonites and retreated to a country house in Somerset (dubbed ‘the Abode of Love’), where he surrounded himself with beautiful women – a fantasy Gray quite reasonably finds appealing. As ...”