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“... profitable business, is very much flourishing. The fashionable term for this operation – which Michael Scott in his new study mentions approvingly more than once – is ‘management consultancy’. In other words, the religious element has been, as far as possible, leached out of the concept. Since we in Europe and the United States have been ...”

“... were 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 ...”

“... modern, the unsurpassed role model of any tenor who signs the Italian repertory. A third of Michael Scott’s decent but pedestrian biography is taken up with a discography and chronology; the other two thirds follow the familiar story down the familiar path – of the 18th child of poor Neapolitan parents whose musical apprenticeship took place in ...”

“... Ridley Scott is always a director to watch. This proposition includes watching for things to avoid, especially when he goes for history and costume, as in 1492 and The Kingdom of Heaven. But there were also The Duellists and Thelma and Louise; and Blade Runner, it seems, is always showing up in a new version. A ‘final cut’, following on the studio cut and the director’s cut, is just out ...”

“... offices of great causes. Among them was the Africa Bureau, led with arctic integrity by the Rev. Michael Scott, with Mary Benson – just as dedicated but warm and welcoming – by his side. Close by was the Aborigines’ Protection Society, run by Tommy Fox Pitt. A dignified, slightly military gentleman, Tommy had been a district officer on the ...”

“... Ridley Scott says his new film, Prometheus, is not a prequel to his 1979 Alien. It just has ‘certain strands of Alien’s DNA, so to speak’. Fans of the first movie and its recurring avatars have been worried about this, and anxious to prove him wrong. This is easy to do in a narrow sense. The dates are right, the human story of Prometheus beginning in 2089 and ending in 2094 (Alien is set in 2122); the same sinister corporation is funding an expedition to a far planet, interested more in plunder than in the meaning of life; and our last glimpse of action in this distant place involves the birth of a slippery wriggling monster, half-snake and three-quarters octopus, from the stomach of a doomed humanoid ...”

“... Much of​ Ridley Scott’s Napoleon feels like an unintended essay on the art of cinema. The good bits, and there are quite a few, make up a silent film with some noise. The terrible bits are over-simplified soap opera, where people talk and are supposed to have feelings. Critics and scholars have complained about ‘historical inaccuracies’, but the most interesting deviations from fact are not that ...”

“... of Guermantes, the narrator says, ‘appeared to me to be a paradise I would never enter’. Scott Moncrieff, the earlier and best-known translator of Proust, is in this case quite literal about the famous sentence, and gives us ‘the true paradises are the paradises that we have lost,’ although even here there is a little slither, since in the ...”

“... documentary about the other side of Thorpe’s life, his affair with a stable groom called Norman Scott in the early 1960s, when homosexuality was still illegal, which eventually led Thorpe to the dock of the Old Bailey, charged with conspiracy to murder. For Mangold, the important thing about Thorpe’s story was not that an unjust law laid a gay politician ...”

“... Milton and Byron. Grierson had a special title to speak about Scotland. Another lecture, on ‘Scott and Carlyle’, begins: ‘The lives of the three greatest of Scottish imaginative writers – Burns, Scott and Carlyle – overlapped in an interesting and, for each successor, an influential manner.’ Carlyle himself ...”

“... deal of chance involved in all this. [Brian Nelson]It’s true that the first English version, Scott Moncrieff’s, has ‘There is a large element of hazard in these matters,’ but this has to be a mistake, or a visit from a linguistic false friend, since hasard is the ordinary French word for ‘chance’. A happy mistake, of course. The game of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... greatly admires, gets drunk and dances on the lawn, it doesn’t seem quite enough to say that ‘Scott did not seem to realise that a drunken dance was not the best way to impress the formal old sea captain.’ I have no independent information about this event but I’m prepared to bet Fitzgerald got so drunk because he did realise – because he ...”

“... This is a heist movie, but the caper itself gets a little blurred, because the director, Tony Scott, is not very interested in the planning or execution of crime, only in the psychodrama of criminality, and its counterpointing with the travails of the good man, in this case Denzel Washington, caught up in a large-scale crisis. Around the two personalities ...”

“... when you feel you need a reminder of the timeframe. Now we move back to 1970, when Milk picks up Scott Smith (James Franco – last seen, by me at least, in the Spider-Man movies) in the New York subway, finds himself in a lasting relationship, comes out of the closet and moves to California, shedding his suit for denims and growing a beard and ponytail. He ...”