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“... especially in comparison to the 20th-century vigour of English literature under I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis. Who cares about roots and origins when you could be debating the Great Tradition? Tolkien returned the compliment. His Letters, published in 1981, betray no interest at all in the stuff most people think of as modern writing, and a loathing of ...”

“... is, as Carter emphasises, ‘a big girl’. Her misjudged but reiterated contempt for Penelope Fitzgerald, who won the Booker Prize in 1979, was perhaps of a piece with her feeling that these were not the times for gentleness or understatement. Carter was, of course, a feminist writer, but as the binary oppositions of a decade characterised by exaggeration ...”

“... of the family, their half-brother, another John Taaffe, to visit a distant kinsman, Lord William Fitzgerald. Actually they have been sent, all too transparently, to get themselves off the shelf. Gagarin is younger, 22, and a Roman resident. He has lived there since he was six, and now occupies his leisure studying art in the studio of the Russian painter ...”

“... on the US Amazon bestseller list, but the true-life Donald J. Trump story has more to do with what Scott Fitzgerald called ‘foul dust’ than with ideas or ideology. Reckoning with Trump means descending into the place that made him. What he represents, above all, is the triumph of an underworld of predators, hustlers, mobsters, clubhouse politicians ...”

“... interviews. John Ardoin is the major authority on Callas, who in Callas (with Gerald Fitzgerald, Thames and Hudson, 1974) and The Callas Legacy (Duckworth, 1977), has forged the most detailed and balanced account and critique of her career to appear to date. With this transcription of Callas’s master classes at the Juilliard School of Music in ...”

“... the glamour they exuded – the young Bob and Maude were as tall and beautiful, everyone said, as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald – their 27-year marriage was a union made in hell: the full-bore, martini-sloshing Wasp nightmare. Hutchins’s biographers – worshipful to a man – place most of the responsibility on Maude. She ...”

“... equally great Count Fosco in the book but also such men of the readership as Swinburne and Edward Fitzgerald, who named his new boat after her. It was difficult for the Rhoda Nunns of fiction to follow her. But Marian Halcombe had no need to work. Though not rich herself, she was half-sister to an heiress. Rhoda Nunn has to work, and this gives Gissing’s ...”

“... reference must be to the fact that there was money in poetry if you wrote the right sort – like Scott’s – because people, chiefly women, did indeed read so much of it. The young Keats read Mary Tighe’s verses with pleasure, and the Misses Porter, of Romance fame, admired his ‘Endymion’. Barnard is right to emphasise just how important the market ...”

“... station, bearing leaflets, carrying messages as proudly as the freshly baked loaves in Ridley Scott’s celebrated commercial, shot in 1973, on the picturesque slopes of Shaftesbury. Carl Barlow, the youth who featured in the advertisement, underscored by the slow movement of Dvorak’s Symphony No 9, arranged for brass, went on to become a fireman in ...”

“... His talents took him to the Royal High School, where William Drummond, Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott had been before him. There Karl became favourite pupil and close friend of Hector MacIver, that incomparable teacher of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton Hill to Rose Street. In those days, a sort ...”

“... phrase, the right to play. Like Beaton, the Sitwells, Cole Porter, Nancy Cunard, Noël Coward, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Lady Diana Cooper and countless other hedonistic Jazz Age types, Murphy, de Acosta and Garland took the right to play for granted, as well they might. Puritanism was an anachronism and in some ...”

“... could not have been written without the formal breakthrough it represented. But Lermontov and Fitzgerald were equally, in certain respects perhaps more, important as inspirations. Powell was no one’s epigone. When he is set beside Proust, it is not the connections between them, but the disparities in reception that are most significant. The literature ...”

“... held weren’t reached. That he himself could not always sustain it can be seen in his debt to Fitzgerald, no Chateaubriand, but one who all the same approached everything in ‘a spirit of pure romanticism’. In his own work, here is the way he finesses the purest romantic epiphany: Would it be too explicit, too exaggerated, to say that when I set eyes ...”