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“... 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, ...”

“... Halleck (1790-1867) travelled to Europe in 1822 he was carrying letters of introduction to Byron, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Lafayette and Talleyrand, though he never actually met any of them – whether through shyness or negligence or something else is not clear. Dickens called on Halleck on arrival in New York in 1842, but later wrote him off as a mere ...”

“... In Pushkin’s introduction to Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, which is included in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of Pushkin’s prose, a friend of the deceased (fictional) writer, a neighbouring squire, says that after his death Belkin’s housekeeper ‘sealed all of her cottage windows with the first part of a ...”

“... was the best book about espionage he had ever read. It is a history of the CIA through the life of Richard Helms, who was director from 1966 to 1973. Much of Powers’s information comes from the spies themselves, and while it is a great achievement to persuade such men to speak, they are masters of what they call ‘disinformation’, and it seems to me that ...”

“... grand head-on, Neoclassical façades for simple reproduction (see, for example, the magnificent Richard Pare collection, Photography and Architecture 1839-1939)? Photography would then be co-operating in the actual construction of the newer buildings, angling into dimensions of built space that our ordinary human bodies have little daily commerce ...”

“... Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of Italian Fascism Douglas Stephen, architect of a ‘Dan Dare mini-skyscraper’ in Swindon, or the South London aesthete Sextus Dyball, designer of ...”

“... And so Soutine falls in with that noble refrain of modern aesthetics, the triumph of failure. As Scott Allan (citing Richard Kendall) remarks in a catalogue essay, Degas had been among the notion’s pioneers. The heart of this show is impossibility – ‘Will I reach the goal I’ve sought so hard?’ as Cézanne ...”

“... she still manages to give a disinterested commentary. Most judgments are benign, or neutral: Richard Long’s and Hamish Fulton’s documented walks tap ‘a narrow, poetic vein’; Gilbert and George ‘have succeeded in charging their surroundings with positive unease: offset by their passivity everything becomes art’; Barry Flanagan’s hares had ...”

“... to address long-term problems such as climate change. In A Great Disorder, the historian Richard Slotkin argues that the crisis is, however, essentially cultural rather than economic or political. Among the contributors to the steadily intensifying ‘culture wars’ between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states, and between rural and urban ...”

“... and surveys a number of translators who were information-gatherers for their paymasters (Richard Burton, for example, the maker of a steamy Arabian Nights). Briggs lobbied hard for the job of translating Roland Barthes’s famous lecture series at the Collège de France, and, in spite of being a newcomer to ‘this little art’, was ...”

“... Abbey, rising above the Solent like a displaced Malian mosque; and at Battersea: Giles Gilbert Scott’s immense power station, fought over for decades, not least by Stamp, was one of the great tokens of its age. Its twin, downriver at Bankside, was, of course, also saved. The Guinness Brewery at Park Royal was vandalised by Diageo with the sanction of the ...”

“... of the poetry have followed this tendency: it is not rare now for critics like, for instance, Richard Holmes in his agreeable volumes of biography, to find Coleridge’s crown as a poet among the ‘Conversation Poems’ – quietly meditative post-Cowper colloquial writing such as ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, and ‘Frost at ...”

“... features which were most faithful to the inner personality. Nor can one overlook Sir Walter Scott, whose frequent insertion of detailed character portraits, unprecedented in his day, set a model for many if not most novelists at home and abroad. Tytler acknowledges his importance in passing, and cites several instances of physiognomic allusion and ...”

“... road to Eglinton was clogged for thirty miles as 100,000 commoners (it was said) gathered to watch Scott’s romances brought to life. But within a few hours a raging storm sent them slogging homeward through morasses of mud, and the blue-blooded cast and audience, their Medieval hair-dos now sodden and lank, retreated into marquees that leaked water at every ...”

“... skilfully retaining all its traditional apparatus. Stendhal’s imagination is a kind of parody of Scott’s: his sensibility is itself its own journal and his own memoir. Reviewing Stendhal’s last book, The Charterhouse of Parma, when it appeared in 1839, Balzac noted admiringly that the novel ‘often contained a whole book in a single page’. But that ...”