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“... e.g. the Black Watch – had received this as a uniform; two generations later, after a Scott-inspired revival, the tartan was systematised. Cluny Macpherson bought his one off a Lowland peg, where it had been marked ‘No 55’. A little later, George IV, at Edinburgh, held a fancy-dress ceremony for his Highland feudatories, most of whom, by ...”

“... Gell published the two handsome volumes of his Pompeiana. He guided round the sites Sir Walter Scott, then nearing the end of his life. Like Shelley, Scott was less moved by the remains than by the thought of the destruction of the cities, and repeatedly exclaimed: ‘The City of the Dead!’ Meanwhile, excavation ...”

“... may have inspired the poems. In this admirably sensitive and also very sensible biography Frances Thomas goes over the known ground, and makes some shrewd suggestions of her own. She is an excellent scholar of the period, and she writes with humour, clarity and restraint. In spite of their Italian looks and background the Rossettis were wholly English in ...”

“... presents for the would-be popular biographer is evident in his entry in the Concise DNB: Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825-1895), man of science; studied at Charing Cross Hospital; announced, 1845, discovery of the layer of cells in root sheath of hair which now bears his name; MB London, 1845; made assistant surgeon on HMS Rattlesnake 1846-50, investigations ...”

“... by the judge who jailed Michelle Renshaw for being too scared to give evidence and who sent Tracey Scott to prison for six months with her baby for letting her friends take goods through her supermarket check-out. The Renshaw case, as it happens, is the subject of about the only conscious revelation in Pickles’s book. ‘I have not been able to reveal until ...”

“... list from which it sometimes seems that only the blessedly sane and sunny Sir Walter Scott will in the end be omitted. Faulkner’s ungrateful and ungracious treatment of his early mentor, Sherwood Anderson, may be charitably interpreted as youthful high jinks (although Karl brings out the malice of rivalry in it). His invitation in distinguished ...”

“... youth on whom Cleopatra bestows a quick glance of regret. The couch is spread; the poem ends. D.M. Thomas, who has made some excellent translations of Pushkin’s poems, has also been daring enough to include in his novel Ararat (successor to The White Hotel) a verse ‘continuation’ of this story. He has the soldier and the philosopher submit successively ...”

“... Knox could seize on her work as worthy of parody – not just recognisable, but recognised. When Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare secured her a civil list pension in 1923, Mew couldn’t decide whether it was more ‘like a dream or a nightmare’. Such diffidence also contained defiance. Her public readings were bracing affairs – ‘like ...”

“... This persona, also called the Romantic Robin, was created early in the 19th century by Keats, Thomas Love Peacock and, above all, Scott, whose Ivanhoe not only features the character of Locksley (Robin Hood) but bases its plot on what Knight calls ‘a displaced Robin Hood story’. The fourth category is Robin on stage ...”

“... conversion, or at least no account as unequivocal as that of his near contemporary, George Gilbert Scott, the most prolific of the English Goths. Reading Pugin, Scott recounted in his memoirs, persuaded him that Gothic was the only style for a Christian country, leaving him to denounce both trabeation and impure Gothic ...”

“... labour, a way of life’. Her artless title is taken from a letter Helen Lowe-Porter wrote to Thomas Mann after she became his English translator. She was, she said later, an ‘unknown instrument … which … must … serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might clothe her for the marketplace until times changed’. ‘Like a ...”

“... the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], ...”

“... hype before slitting their throats. ‘There are no second acts in American lives,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald, archetype of the American artist betrayed by the Judas kiss of fame, his early work overpraised, he himself declared a has-been just as he was achieving mastery. No one understood the process better than the author of The Great Gatsby, certainly ...”

“... a characteristic military balls-up.’ Early in April a new wireless operator, Sergeant Kenneth Scott, was parachuted in to join Frank, while Scott’s code-book was dropped to a wholly different unit ‘somewhere in Thrace’ – and this at a time when the unit’s headquarters were being transferred from Cairo to Bari ...”

“... autograph corrections and additions in a copy of the 1818 first edition which she gave to a Mrs Thomas of Genoa in 1823; Nora Crook’s 1996 edition of Frankenstein includes these changes, as well as those from the editions printed in 1823 and 1831, in her extremely useful appendix on textual variants. She identifies the changes to the two-volume 1823 ...”