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“... emigration was caused by the Highland Clearances. Mel Gibson in Braveheart wears a kilt to play William Wallace. George IV squeezed himself into a kilt and pink tights to visit Edinburgh. Livingstone was supposed to get on well with Africans because of his Highland ancestry. It wasn’t until the 1960s that radicals like Tom Nairn and ...”

“... The Gazette set the scene for the first of literary journalism’s battles between editor (William Jerdan) and proprietor and main advertiser (Colburn). Having lost control of the Literary Gazette, Colburn was instrumental in setting up the Athenaeum (1828), the weekly which was to become the top mid-Victorian review.* Again a battle had to be fought ...”

“... as more like a thoroughgoing Victorian, offering the sort of landscape painting Ruskin admired in William Dyce. (The people-crowded canvas of Frith was yet to come.) Suddenly the novel leaps from the unchanging Sussex village to wild, hectic Greenwich Village, the hot streets of Manhattan, ‘its echoing cataracts of iron and stone’. We can almost hear the ...”

“... an unfavourable reading of portions of the novel which he had shown to two of his friends, Albert Murray and the critic Anatole Broyard. Ellison had good reason to feel troubled. Juneteenth is a set of fragments masquerading as a whole – a Frankenstein’s monster, Louis Menand called it in the New York Times – and the simple plot line that Callahan ...”

“... and Manfred, later by having the foresight to die for liberty in Greece. After a good summary by William Ruddick of his posthumous fortunes at home, Trueblood’s other contributors report (mostly rather woodenly) from various European countries on the progress of the legend. Robert Escarpit feels that Byron has not mattered much to Frenchmen, except to ...”

“... the histories of people who love, and who, as a result, find themselves in the wrong lives: Adam Murray in his friend Johnny’s, John Chadwick in his rival William Nelson’s, Richard Verey in absolutely anyone’s but his own, Richard Fisher in that of the American spy Polina Mertz. The governing myth, I think, is ...”

“... checking – she didn’t. For the earliest verified usage, we have to wait for the scholar-critic William Taylor in 1797, and even he had his doubts. He disliked ‘self-biography’, coined the previous year by Isaac D’Israeli, because ‘it is not very usual in English to employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet autobiography would have ...”

“... Marbot (1803, now at the Tate) and Lady Catherine (1804, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland); William Turner and Sir David Brewster (inventor of the kaleidoscope) were frequent guests; on his solitary rides in the Lakes he often called on De Quincey (then editor of the Westmorland Gazette), and visited ...”

“... complex history, involving other people: an amanuensis (sometimes Mary Shelley), the publisher (Murray), his editor (Gifford), friends with or without authority to act for the poet, readers, shady piratical publishers and shadowy fakers, forgers and parodists. The ‘social’ emphasis brings out the process whereby a poem is shaped before and after ...”

“... ought there to be a glossary, ‘ee by gum’ or ‘eeh baah gum’? (The issues are raised by William Neill when he prints two versions of the same poem on facing pages, both in dialect but one a good deal more dialectal than the other.) Since poets are not etymologists they may play fast and loose, as MacDiarmid did when assembling some of his lyrics ...”

“... overtly sad poems of his life. Three years later we find him writing to his next publisher John Murray, asking him if he may supply a preface to the new collection and saying that his poems are not satirical; such a step, he hopes, might save him from being reviewed by professional humorists. My immediate reaction to this was amazement at his denying that a ...”

“... Year, my ignorance of the turf was such that when one of my salesmen suggested that the bookmaker William Hill might send out a leaflet, I had to inquire who Mr Hill was. I tracked him down, and although he declined a leaflet, he ordered fifty thousand copies of the book. That was a bonanza year. Marie Stopes was my first encounter with an egocentric ...”

“... for the modern period. In earlier periods it probably requires excerpts from Frances Sheridan, William Chaigneau and Thomas Amory to create a readership for these novels. Ian Campbell Ross’s superbly informative introduction to ‘Fiction to 1800’ creates a persuasive argument for a political relevance and a coherent tradition in the early Irish ...”

“... the Hollywood CP, after the ‘fair seed-time’ of the Popular Front) are almost all unwatchable. Murray Kempton in Part of Our Time entertained himself by naming some of them: They Shall Have Music, I Stole a Million, Army Girl, The Kid from Kokomo, Mama Runs Wild, Tenth Avenue Kid. One can think of exceptions (Angels with Dirty Faces, for instance), but the ...”

“... to make prudential changes in his manuscripts, and left the rest in the hands of the publisher Murray and his advisers: ‘Ask Mr Gifford and Mr Hobhouse, and, as they think, so let it be.’ To some extent this kind of interference, sanctioned as it was, justifies talk about replacing the author with Foucault’s ‘author-function’, a term designed to ...”