“... authentic. What is most impressive about Ashbery’s poems is their tactile urbanity, the spruce craft of their diction, which, like James’s prose, becomes more enjoyable and revealing, in and for itself, each time one makes one’s way through it. Moreover, a typically modern kind of intimacy grows out of the very absence of what one conventionally ...”

“... market’. In a startling unpublished passage from the journals quoted by Rose, she defended the craft of True Confessions writing: ‘It takes a good tight plot and a slick ease that are not picked up overnight like a cheap whore.’ To American ears, the word has at least some echoes of urbanity and sophistication, as in ‘the city slicker’. But to her ...”

“... the Sultan (who inspired his own soldiers with the cry of ‘O Islam’) without the usual Mongol craft and precaution, and lost his army and his life. Had Hulagu been able to return he would certainly have taken a terrible revenge for the defeat of his faithful general, but troubles detained him elsewhere; and so the myth of Mongol supremacy vanished from a ...”

“... lash to and fro like a dog shaking a rat. Compare this work of nature with Spiral Jetty, which Robert Smithson built out into Great Salt Lake in Utah thirty years ago. It’s more neatly coiled than the spit at Rudha Cailleach. Both change continually, the one in its shape, the other in its invisibility; indeed Salt Lake rose recently and drowned the ...”

“... cultural enlightenment. ‘At its heart is the conceptual transformation of painting from a manual craft to a liberal art.’ Painting became a liberal art, one might say, because it became associated with a form of liberal critical discourse. Paintings were understood not merely as objects of aesthetic beauty, but as bearers of meanings which it required a ...”

“... been virtually denied, by studies of parties as well as of politicians. Baldwin’s political craft, and craftiness, emerge with fresh clarity in this account. Standing for Parliament for the first time at the age of 40, for the seat his father had just vacated, he offered himself simply as his father’s son, and was soon telling an aunt that elections ...”

“... attempt to persuade others that Manilius was worth their trouble. ‘I adjure you,’ he wrote to Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, ‘not to waste your time on Manilius. He writes on astronomy and astrology without knowing either.’ To an American correspondent he wrote: ‘I do not send you a copy, as it would shock you very much; it is so dull that few ...”

“... that the circuit of manufacture and distribution, the bringing into a gallery space of commerce, craft, installation, sculpture, performance and activism, was integral to her idea of the art.’ Each box of soap bears her signature. Like the ci wara headdress, the past reaches Tunde in the form of a rarefied object to which he now tries to restore ...”

“... was a cosmopolitan town of around nine thousand inhabitants at its peak and ‘alive with busy craft industries’, including the carving of bone and antler and textile manufacture using wool or flax. With the reassuring predictability of a children’s history book, the next historic event discussed is the pillaging of the Strand by the Vikings. The ...”

“... subsequent books had been well received, but it was North that really established him: it prompted Robert Lowell to declare him the best Irish poet since Yeats, and he was widely celebrated by the London reviewers, who seemed on the whole untroubled by the suggestion that the Irish might be constitutionally disposed to killing one another. Heaney didn’t ...”

“... dock. It was the same gunmetal grey as the sky. The only spot of colour was a tiny orange rescue craft, tucked at the ship’s side. I took a photo and was shooed away by a security guard. He couldn’t stop me taking pictures, since I was outside the yard, but I gave up anyway. I couldn’t get a decent shot of the ship – it was too big.The biggest ...”

“... Paramount’s jitteriness about casting an unknown. The studio, which was also reluctant to cast Robert Duvall and Brando, wanted many actors more than they wanted Pacino. ‘They wanted Jack Nicholson. They wanted Robert Redford. They wanted Warren Beatty or Ryan O’Neal.’ Imagine The Godfather with ...”

“... to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge ...”

“... study of Browning’s verse as an essentially introspective art, The Elusive Self in the Poetry of Robert Browning. But the thesis seems regrettably mistaken, in that it generates and enforces a wrong notion of ‘poetry’ as well as of Browning: poetry as absolutely distinguished from the normal world in which the writer lives. In his early years Browning ...”

“... the plantation in Beloved, the mental ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the bus in Robert Olen Butler’s Mr Spaceman all function as metaphors for the creative writing workshop.) McGurl also provides a smart and useful typology of ‘programme’ fiction (defined as the prose work of MFA graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main ...”