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“... the best known was Charles Brockden Brown’s macabre Edgar Huntley (1799), although Washington Irving’s collection of short stories and vignettes, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., would prove immensely popular the year Smith made his jibe. (Like Cooper after him, Irving had taken up his pen partly in response ...”

“... to tell the tale as they’d seen it unfold at three in the morning from the stairway: ‘Clifford Irving in boxer shorts and a mink coat’; ‘Viva clutching her baby’; ‘Miloš Forman wearing a skirt borrowed from a neighbour’; and the weaver Juliette Hamelcourt, once a lady in waiting to Queen Astrid of the Belgians, with her dog under one arm and a ...”

“... surprises. More than once, we come across the scene from the end of Ford’s The Searchers, where John Wayne catches up with the girl who’s been stolen by the Indians. We think he’s going to kill her, because he hates the idea of contamination, however innocently incurred. He picks her up and everything changes. He carries her back towards home, all ...”

“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate ...”

“... originally titled ‘God Blessed America’ – in February 1940, in response to the sentiments of Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’: Let us all be grateful for a land so fair, As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer … From the mountains, to the prairies, To the oceans, white with foam God bless America, My home sweet home. Goddamnit: in the ...”

“... the fatal precision of the physical sciences. This second period draws to a close with the fall of John Law and the great financial collapses in Paris, London and the Dutch cities in 1720-1. On 29 August 1728, Montesquieu visits the Scots financier in Venice and, on the evidence of the shorthand notes in the posthumously published Voyages, does not understand ...”

“... intellectuals by events. Trilling’s story is told by other New Yorkers, including Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz, who between them seem to muster a greater range of ages, backgrounds and perhaps professional experience than the Leavis contributors. The atmosphere is more wide-awake than the English colloquium on the home-grown magus. Is ...”

“... whose powers of acting and sermonising had been complimented by no less a connoisseur than Henry Irving, but who must have been a terrible father, particularly at moments when he took his parental duties with Calvinist solemnity. Patrick probably inherited a taste for drink and drama, a touch of Scottish diablerie with literary affiliations in James ...”

“... Over the years it became a museum filled with dubious relics whose ersatz charm gave Washington Irving such delight in 1815: ‘I am always of easy faith in such matters . . . and am ever willing to be deceived, where the deceit is pleasant, and costs nothing.’ For the Victorians, however, the physical remains of the house were insufficiently resonant. In ...”

“... is the 16th book about Laurence Olivier, and his foreword tells of two more biographers, John Cottrell and Garry O’Connor, too intent on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the ...”

“... In his off hours, London ‘wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew’, as he wrote in John Barleycorn, his ‘alcoholic reminiscences’. He was a child labourer in Oakland at 14, a Bay Area pirate at 15, a transcontinental hobo at 16, an able-bodied seaman at 17, a New York State prisoner at 18, a California ‘work beast’ at 20 and a Yukon ...”

“... is a half-hearted attempt to elevate the proceedings by including testimony from the likes of Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, but even they tend to get dragged down into the mire. (Who else but a really professional ‘professional interviewer’ could have persuaded Diana Trilling to reveal that she has ‘often wondered what Norman was like in ...”

“... with help from his father, his own farm on Staten Island. He visited his younger brother, John, at Yale, making friends with some of his high-minded circle, including Charles Loring Brace, who later founded the Children’s Aid Society. Brace and the Olmsted brothers travelled to Europe in 1850, walking through the English countryside and visiting ...”

“... the process. It also reflects the strikingly ‘novelistic’ character of many of their lives. John Barrell has observed acutely (in the LRB of 2 November 2000) that so-called literary biography seems now to have become markedly less ‘literary’, subordinating or virtually ignoring the work of the writer concerned, except insofar as it can be made to ...”

“... as heroic, but it is also questioned. ‘Curiously enough,’ Schuyler tells Lincoln’s secretary John Hay on the novel’s last page, Bismarck ‘has now done the same thing to Germany that you tell us Mr Lincoln did to our country’. Of all the novels in the sequence, Lincoln pays most attention, though not very elaborate attention, to characters from the ...”