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“... The most remarkable aspect of the Scott Report is its simplicity. The famous length and the differing interpretations to which it has been subjected since its publication suggest a learned and complex treatise full of ambiguity and complex allusion, a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul ...”

“... has become something of a party game. To my knowledge, there are five versions currently on offer. Scott Moncrieff renders it as ‘For a long time I used to go to bed early.’ Terence Kilmartin reproduced this in his revised translation, but Enright, in his revision of Kilmartin, has altered ‘used to go’ to ‘would go’. In addition, James Grieve’s ...”

“... supposed to have hunted down and murdered Merlin in these woods; the valley was home to Michael Scott, a wizard who appears in Dante’s Inferno. The area was in unruly border country, and it is also on the spine of Scotland, where the waters divide to flow west or east. James Laidlaw’s grandfather Will O’Phaup followed fairies one evening into the ...”

“... of seven novelists: Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, Clara Reeve and Frances Burney. (There are occasional references to other writers, such as Jane Austen.) A segment on, for instance, ‘Daughters’ will discuss daughters and the code of daughterliness as represented in the novels. But the much more ...”

“... in the literature, is endlessly contemporary, from the menace of Injun Joe to the march of Margaret Mitchell’s carpet-baggers, from Faulkner’s tentacular Snopeses to Flannery O’Connor’s blackhearted preachers. Welty documents the fall (her loss) in a very Protestant way, as something immutable. Degradation and its agents – often heralds of ...”

“... of language. Editors at Gollancz had to rewrite for grammar and spelling, and a photograph in Margaret Forster’s biography shows a dictionary as the only book on the desk. Her technique was unliterary in general, innocent of Modernist experimentation or self-consciousness. All content and no form: a recipe for oblivion. Yet thanks to the absence of ...”

“... with sunflowers; on the cover of A Country Calendar a round-limbed family lounges among ferns. Margaret Lane’s introduction talks of ‘small country masterpieces’ and ‘delightful reading’. In Flora Thompson’s case, the less delight, the better the story. ‘Heatherley’ begins with the 20-year-old Flora Thompson arriving at the post office ...”

“... his brother hanged, drawn and quartered years after the event. For all the disgust of Sir Walter Scott, the cast of thought promoted by The Wealth of Nations had, by 1820, colonised even the remotest Highlands. ‘As the country advanced in civilisation,’ the Countess of Sutherland’s factor wrote, surveying an empty Strathnaver, ‘other objects of ...”

“... conducting the negotiations with Henry VII that led to the marriage two years later of Princess Margaret Tudor to James IV. ‘London thow art of Towynys A per se’, an anonymous poem, is said in one surviving manuscript copy to have been delivered at a dinner held by the Lord Mayor during the Christmas festivities that accompanied this visit, by ‘a ...”

“... it was seen in terms of the future rather than the past; as the architect Arthur Penty (quoted by Margaret Rose) observed in 1922, ‘Post-Industrialism connotes Medievalism.’ But theological modernists, like the English Catholic George Tyrrell, saw Medievalism as incompatible with modernity and banished it to the Middle Ages where it took on the static ...”

“... of women, and these have often been disclosures of sexual practices’ – as if revelations of Scott Fitzgerald’s alcoholic excesses, Robert Frost’s nastiness and pettiness, Philip Larkin’s racism, or Roald Dahl’s arrogance had not tempered readers’ adulation. While she herself has written a biography of John Dos Passos as well as books on Ellen ...”

“... What can it mean? Bainbridge’s haunting previous novel, The Birthday Boys, is about Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, which ended in death and disaster in March 1912. The Titanic’s maiden voyage ended the same way a month later. One might think that Bainbridge was obsessed by Edwardian man’s hopelessness at challenging nature; or else ...”

“... between them and their often disparate specialities have never previously been explored. Walter Scott and Victor Hugo feature among the less familiar scholars, and some painters, including Bonnington and Delacroix, make brief appearances. As these names suggest, Hill has much to tell us about Anglo-French relations, present as well as past.We learn, for ...”

“... ambitious people keen to meet aristocrats there were also, as the much discussed ‘Princess Margaret set’ demonstrated, members of the upper classes happy to meet at least the more talented and glamorous members of the lower orders. Yet Thompson fills in this background to Lucan’s later life and its ultimate debacle with a clumsily broad brush. The ...”

“... material – for example, the strange meditation on the death of Wilson’s second wife Margaret Canby. She had died after a fall down some steps – after a party in California. Wilson describes in detail the long flight west (this was in 1932), the talk of the stewardess and his fellow passengers, the varying landscape, all as if he had a duty to ...”