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“... found themselves engaged in complex and fateful negotiations with European culture. One was Scott Joplin, black ‘King of Ragtime’ and already the famous composer of ‘Maple Leaf Rag’, ‘The Entertainer’, ‘Peacherine Rag’ and ‘Elite Syncopations’. (The other can be caught up with later.) The son of a former slave, born in 1868, the year ...”

“... literary world noticed about Dale Peck was his youth. Now 28, he produced the harrowing Martin and John (attractively published in Britain as Fucking Martin) at 25. Why do we expect so little of the (not all that) young? Peck’s sophistication needs no excuse or applause on those grounds. There is something far more remarkable about him within the youth ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... even those who make no claims to any form of grandeur. The subject of The Birthday Boys is Scott’s expedition to the South Pole of 1910-12, an awfully big misadventure, or more truly the members of the expedition. While allowing five of them to speak for themselves in distinctive voices, she follows selectively the accounts given by ...”

“... certainty about who really did what to whom than if Jeremy Thorpe, George Deakin, David Holmes and John Le Mesurier had been invited to take off their shoes and socks and walk along a trench full of glowing charcoal. As with the trench method, the populace gathered to watch or to read about how the defendants survived this ancient, agonising, irrational test ...”

“... say, Dostoevsky’s Mr Golyadkin in The Double. Miller’s book has an atmosphere at once like Scott and like Proust, full of marvels, full of shrewdness and of humour, its perspective all-embracing. For one thing, it redefines and reinstates the concept of escapism. Hawthorn’s shorter book is more avowedly clinical in its approach, often equally ...”

“... business, is very much flourishing. The fashionable term for this operation – which Michael Scott in his new study mentions approvingly more than once – is ‘management consultancy’. In other words, the religious element has been, as far as possible, leached out of the concept. Since we in Europe and the United States have been educated to regard ...”

“... girl’. On that occasion he had been competing in the swim with a bachelor friend, Alexander Scott, and the Cavalier Angelo Mengaldo, a former officer in Napoleon’s Army who claimed to have swum the Berezina under Russian gunfire. Mengaldo took to a gondola long before Venice was reached, and Scott gave up at the ...”

“... seal-fur sporran, had I been able (aged nine) to find out from such a book as this latest work of John Prebble’s that all these tartans were nothing but hype: a stunt devised chiefly by Scott to make George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in August 1822 as splendiferous as possible. In his anonymous shilling pamphlet ‘HINTS ...”

“... heyday of its literary, cultural and philosophic life lasted for a hundred years to the death of Scott and left its mark on Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie S. Swan, Sir Compton Mackenzie and a thousand others: the subject is God’s own gift to the sifter of anecdotes and ...”

“... of evidence? – but Welsh refers us to a very early review by James in which he suggested that Scott was the first ‘novelist irresponsible’, undertaking nothing more than the facts of his tale, whereas the 18th-century novel was didactic to the core. Tom Jones was ‘like a vast episode in a sermon preached by a grandly humorous divine.’ In his own ...”

“... William Small was teaching Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to Jefferson at William and Mary. By 1768 John Witherspoon from the Laigh Kirk, Paisley, was basing his Princeton lectures on Blair’s Rhetoric. In 1781 Wither spoon coined the pejorative term ‘Americanism’, by analogy with ‘Scotticism’. Strong connections between Scottish and American cultures ...”

“... skinhead, did not his clothes deny it.’ That quotation well illustrates the style in which John Fowles begins this historical novel, or mystery story, lingering over his descriptions. The reviewer-like use of the present tense, the schoolmasterly ‘not what it means today’, and the reference to ‘a modern skinhead’, invite readers to visualise ...”

“... deal of chance involved in all this. [Brian Nelson]It’s true that the first English version, Scott Moncrieff’s, has ‘There is a large element of hazard in these matters,’ but this has to be a mistake, or a visit from a linguistic false friend, since hasard is the ordinary French word for ‘chance’. A happy mistake, of course. The game of ...”

“... of 1967 – by then, we were married – Lorna woke up and informed me it was time she ‘did some Scott’. She insisted on taking me with her to Crow’s bookshop in Upper St Giles Street, Norwich, and twenty minutes later we emerged in the July sunlight with me half a step behind her, like a footman, carrying the Collected Works of ...”