“... 1950s, though seldom or never so well as by MacCaig, the mode went decisively out of fashion when Robert Lowell, bell-wether of the Anglo-American flock, repudiated it for his Life Studies (1955). MacCaig no doubt, sensing which way the wind was blowing, dismantled the admittedly cumbrous machinery of such writing so as to fall into line with the more ...”

“... and see what happened, though his early books feel as if he did: he boasted that he could, when young, contain a whole novel in his head. Muriel Spark is said to sit down at her desk, take a clean piece of paper and begin, say, ‘Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark. Chapter One’, before she has thought further. Not so Waugh, who set about carrying out ...”

“... of an intermediary. (This surely was one function of his friendship with the ardent Schoenbergian Robert Craft – which Keller does not mention – a friendship which began three years before Schoenberg’s death.) Many perceptive observers will have taken it for granted that Webern acted as a kind of buffer between the two other composers, and will be ...”

“... caverns humming ... Spectre, spectre where If among these early places lie you, do you lie? The young poet seems unconsciously to have realised that ‘Modernism’ could as easily be suggested by language that sounded archaic, translated (‘Large lakes unreal’, ‘lie you, do you lie?’), as by the more conventional Modernist expedient of direct ...”

“... his safety – and particularly disliked their persistent use of a pseudonym. When he picked up a young woman in Leicester Square and started taking her out, at least one Sunday Times journalist warned him against her. Vanunu saw this as yet another unnecessary interference with his freedom. But his reluctance to be kept secure does not let the Sunday Times ...”

“... the wrong door, and gone to church instead of the movies. ‘It’s like a morality car wash,’ Robert De Niro says in voice-over, adding that Las Vegas is to Americans what Lourdes is to Europeans: a place where you look for miracles to take your pains and blemishes away. You dream of healing and you leave lots of money behind. Scorsese’s Casino is full ...”

“... just happened, and then develop it into a metaphor for an existential quest. Her title, taken from Robert Frost (‘I have it in me so much nearer home/To scare myself with my own desert places’), shifts the focus from the real journey to the inner one. In a Prelude to the book, she seems to allude to Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’: ‘Sometimes it seems ...”

“... that most offshore fishermen are not driven by the romance of the open sea: ‘By and large, young men from Gloucester find themselves at sea because they’re broke and need money fast.’ The work can pay off. On his only previous trip – also on the Andrea Gail – Bobby made $4,537 in a month on the Grand Banks, and Captain Billy Tyne made ...”

“... platforms, some dotted with information about a famous person from the past (Erasmus Darwin or Robert McNamara), as though a documentary script were in the making or a history seminar had just finished. Or, finally, a kiosk cobbled together from plastic and plywood, and filled, like a homemade study-shrine, with images and texts devoted to a particular ...”

“... be seen in their writings, which sought a revival of the fortunes of the kingdom and saw in the young Edward the true gold they were seeking. Particular attention is paid to alchemists with Court connections, such as Thomas Norton, Robert Barker and George Ripley, whom Hughes represents as exercising a shaman-like ...”

“... believer than the secular intellectuals he sneered at? The evidence is inconclusive. Although as a young man he had considered ordination, the more the older Cowling obsessed over religion the less he seemed to be interested in Christianity as either transcendence or moral guide. Instead, like a plumber seeking the appropriate rod for unblocking a drain, he ...”

“... sight of something by the shore of the lake: turtles waddling in to end the story in the manner of Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ or Tobias Wolff’s ‘Poaching’: ‘They watch those turtles on their slow march and behold those ancient creatures, shell-backed and the colour of time, as they lower themselves, turtle upon turtle, disappearing into the ...”

“... of Fountain’s long apprenticeship is that his 1970s-vintage literary models – among them Robert Stone, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer in Vietnam-era reportage mode – turned out to be pretty useful for a writer hitting his stride at the start of the 21st century. His main adjustments concern mood. For the pill-popping nerviness of Didion and ...”

“... Robert Frost’s crack about free verse – that it’s tennis without a net – might be modified to describe Georges Perec’s novels: they’re tennis with nets everywhere. His whodunnit La Disparition (1969), a lipogram, was written without the use of the letter e (it was translated into e-less English as A Void by Gilbert Adair in 1994 ...”

“... should be, that influence has occasioned remarkably little anxiety in the younger poets, such as Robert Crawford, Liz Lochead, W.N. Herbert, Kathleen Jamie and Jackie Kay, who have learned from him. In Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity, Colin Nicholson tries to account for his many-sided subject by examining him facet by facet, but the result is rather ...”