“... before the case came up. Perhaps the two authors were suing for intertextuality. In the novel, Robert Langdon, the Harvard scholar played by Tom Hanks in the movie, has a fine nonsensical riff on the presence of Mary Magdalene and ‘the subjugated goddess’ in modern popular culture, and what we might call the Walt Disney code (‘Like Leonardo, Walt ...”

“... any director with two expensive stars on his hands. Remember Michael Mann’s thriller Heat, where Robert de Niro and Al Pacino get together for a totally inconsequential conversation just so we can see them together before they return to their posts on opposite sides of the law. The stars have to share serious screen time, even if the plot stagnates for a ...”

“... as it turns out, is illegal for public employees in New York State), the union leader, Robert Toussaint, was sent to jail and otherwise ‘progressive’ residents spat venom at their train conductors, platform sweepers and track-layers for daring to walk off the job. During the strike I stayed overnight at a friend’s house because commuting from ...”

“... not to say that her poems aren’t scholarly, or don’t deal with adult subjects. Cesare Pavese, Robert Walser, Emin Pasha, Anne Frank, Li Po, Keats and Cipriano de Rore are just a few of the historical characters who wander into her work. She often writes about ageing. ‘Pause’, her alarming and very funny piece about menopause (‘A kind of wild forest ...”

“... paintings in fashioning Western notions of modernity – captivating everyone from Picasso to Robert Smithson – means that we can no longer see them clearly. Their sites may have been chosen with care, but we have no sense of their meaning to those early inhabitants. The earliest interpreters of cave art presented it as shamanic. A caption in the ...”

“... Robert Lowell wrote the poem ‘Water’ about being on the coast of Maine in the summer of 1948 with Elizabeth Bishop; he put it first in his collection For the Union Dead, which he published in 1964. He sent Bishop a draft of the poem in March 1962, explaining that it was ‘more romantic and grey than the whole truth, for all has been sunny between us ...”

“... listen that he was headed for the White House. He mapped out a plan to get there from which, as Robert Caro writes, ‘he refused to be diverted.’ It meant first establishing himself in state politics, then winning a seat in the House of Representatives, then moving up to the Senate and finally to the highest office. He was undaunted by the fact that no ...”

“... of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of ...”

“... meantime not dealt so kindly with Mary Kathleen Macrory Ackland – universally known as Molly. Robert Ackland’s charisma had always had a punitive edge: he insisted that his daughter accompany him on his rounds in the surgical wards; and then afterwards, according to Warner, to the brothel he frequented, where she would be told to wait in the ...”

“... Hump’ as Bloomsberries called her, was 11 years older than Julia. The astonishing success of Robert Elsmere (1888) made her the second most famous woman in Victorian England. Her poignant saga of a young Anglican priest who defects from the Church to rediscover God in the slums of London sold by the hundred thousand in Britain. In America, unprotected by ...”

“... in the early 1960s, she nonetheless continued picking up nubile girls with aplomb, including (says Robert Schanke) a ‘tubercular young British actress who was a waitress in a coffee shop’. Once one might have welcomed such a seduction, fang marks, TB and all. I remember much relishing de Acosta’s gossipy 1960 autobiography, Here Lies the Heart, when it ...”

“... poems in Parnassus, Emerson’s 1872 anthology of American poets. It took an English journalist, Robert Buchanan in the London Daily News, to publicise the complaints already made by William Rossetti and other English literati: that America was barbarously disdaining its greatest poet. But this rescue operation only made matters worse at home, when the ...”

“... that truancy is good and that the rules are good. ‘The most beautiful thing in the world,’ Robert Frost wrote in his Notebooks, ‘is conflicting interests when both are good.’ Someone with a truant mind believes that conflict is the point, not the problem. The job of the truant mind is to keep conflict as alive as possible, which means that ...”

“... Corrections to the dates of subsequent letters are also duly made. One more example: a letter to Robert McAlmon that was mistakenly assigned to 2 May 1921 in the first edition, but is correctly assigned to 22 May in this one. It matters a lot, because it is written on the same paper used in three other letters written between 9 and 22 May; Eliot also used ...”

“... into the land of the free. Assange has been denounced by everybody from the US defense secretary, Robert Gates, to my nephew Rory, a student at the University of Aberdeen, who believes Assange is alone responsible for a general upswing in the fortunes of computer nerds at the expense of guitar heroes. I have now read a number of the 92,000 reports leaked by ...”