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“... Although the modern has been with us since the end of antiquity, it has, at least until recently, always avoided becoming antique. As early as the 17th century, some were arguing that by virtue of longevity, the moderns must already be more ancient than the ancients themselves; but unlike the true ancients, who remained trapped in undying senility, the moderns seemed to have the secret of eternal youth, and for another three centuries they grew younger as their predecessors aged ...”

“... heyday of its literary, cultural and philosophic life lasted for a hundred years to the death of Scott and left its mark on Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie S. Swan, Sir Compton Mackenzie and a thousand others: the subject is God’s own gift to the sifter of anecdotes and ...”

“... Iraq. Machon is an important witness, but only a small cog in the conspiracy, which, as the Scott Inquiry hearings are beginning tentatively to reveal, was just as ‘wide-ranging’ and ‘sophisticated’ as the US operation from which it took its lead. Saddam sought to build up his links with Britain, which had so many historical associations with ...”

“... those: In his chamber, weak and dying, Was a Norman baron lying … I couldn’t find this in Scott (school prize), nor in Kipling’s Collected Verse. I have had it offered to the best brains at the Savage Club bar, without success. Could it be Macaulay? I do not possess Macaulay’s verse other than the Lays of Ancient Rome. Can the ODQ, 1935 or ...”

“... over time of the top 20 per cent and the bottom 20 per cent. Scheidel has chosen not only to lash himself to the mast of the Gini coefficient, but also largely to restrict himself to the data gathered by record-keeping societies – i.e. states and empires. Absent from consideration, therefore, are the thinly scattered but huge populations that existed ...”

“... it happened to Papa like this was in Billings Montana (1930) when they used kangaroo tendons to lash the bones. You get used to it. Don’t mention this accident to anybody, Pos. It will start all the professors off on that ‘Hemingstein was a clumsy drunk who couldn’t hit a typewriter unless it hit him first’ kind of shit. I hate that stuff. The ...”

“... Common Wind, which takes its title from Wordsworth’s sonnet to Louverture, is based on Julius Scott’s 1986 doctoral dissertation. It didn’t find a publisher until 2018, by which time Scott was an emeritus lecturer at Michigan and had given up on his work reaching a wide audience. Photocopies – and, later, PDFs ...”

“... the cow-puncher (‘the last romantic figure upon our soil’, as he called him) is a version of Scott’s medieval knight. Like Wister, Grey would use his novels to endorse what he called ‘the great virtues’: manliness, chivalry, bravery. Grey also took over from Wister what was to be the main liability of the Western as a literary form, its ingrained ...”

“... and an almost total lack of self-control. From the moment they met until what Walter Scott called the ‘brutal insanity’ of the queen’s trial for adultery in 1820, the relationship was a catastrophe acted out in public with little regard for decency, let alone dignity. Ever since, this riveting spectacle of royals behaving badly has offered ...”

“... and the ‘autographic sequel’, which is not an imitation but a prolongation – like Walter Scott’s or James Fenimore Cooper’s novel cycles, or Balzac’s Human Comedy. Both types are tied to market forces. Collections like To Be Continued: An Annotated Guide to Sequels (1995) and The Whole Story: 3000 Years of Sequels and Sequences (1996) attest to ...”

“... slaves of contemporary British Australia and America, one class had the power of the noose and the lash over another, and could use it on a whim, at a word, for a trifle. Against this, there is the rain of happy endings, usually involving forgiveness by a religious or secular authority figure. It is as if, in a Dickensian way, Leskov wants to enjoy the ...”

“... because women and poor men are alike ‘unlettered’ – Defoe and Haywood alike come under the lash in the Dunciad. To think of either group as ‘lettered’ is to think of the other group as ‘lettered’ also, and to pose a threat to the social edifice. Yet the Lockean project demands discovering and imagining the experiences of others, experiences ...”

“... rock-’em, sock-’em first marriage to the novelist Elaine Dundy, their drunken rows rivalling Scott and Zelda’s. His snap conversion to Marxism after seeing Mother Courage. His hero-worship of Castro and his defence of the Cuban revolution, which led to his being summoned before the United States Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to explain himself ...”

“... regarded by me with loathing and disgust. Then to be driven in to the fields beneath the eye and lash of the brutal overseer, and those miserable huts, with their promiscuous crowds of dirty, obscene and degraded objects, for my home I could not, would not bear it. A day picking cotton makes her fingers bleed. This is Hannah, who can not only read, but play ...”

“... Drakard established a rival newspaper, the Stamford News, edited by the radical journalist John Scott, who was later to edit the London Magazine. The village of Helpston itself was caught between two landed and political interests: Burghley Park was the seat of the Exeters, who were Tories, while the Milton Estate belonged to the Fitzwilliams, who were ...”