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“... crucial analytic concept after her: the Female Ovation Complex, perhaps. And indeed, why not? As Robert Gottlieb’s concise yet stylish new biography reminds us, the great actress’s sumptuously chequered life would have presented even the most dimwitted Viennese shrink with a veritable orchestra pit of things to quiz her about. Consider, Herr Doktor, some ...”

“... set trauma on a new course. And psychoanalysis reciprocated the favour. Not only did analysts like Robert Jay Lifton and Bruno Bettelheim help construct the Holocaust as the paradigmatic case of a traumatic event that could not fail to leave ‘a trace on the individual and collective memory’, they also developed a clinical entity, ‘survivor syndrome’ or ...”

“... own son, John, who also became an adept fiddler, like his grandfather. Clare felt an affinity with Robert Burns, collected songs as Burns did, and during his asylum years wrote a number of songs in the Scottish vernacular. Clare says in his autobiography that both his parents were ‘illiterate to the last degree’. Concerned to dispel the myths, Bate points ...”

“... art studies Maude Phelps McVeigh married the precocious, prodigious, ‘collar-ad handsome’ Robert Maynard Hutchins, a brilliant young teacher and law student who became secretary to the Yale Corporation in 1923 at the age of 24. In 1928, soon after receiving his law degree and a professorship, he was made dean of the Law School – the youngest in Yale ...”

“... Messiaen’s goal, exactly: he wrote music to praise God, not to proselytise. Nonetheless, as Robert Sholl argues in his ‘critical biography’, it’s not easy to disentangle Messiaen’s art from his belief that in composing he was ‘making a transcendent God empirical and sensate’. The music, Sholl suggests, allows ‘believers and non-believers ...”

“... Morris scholar John Drinkwater, as though to oppose it would be derisive of the common mood. Robert Byron, less precious than usual, regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance than Nash’s Regent Street, and one ruined pointed arch than all Wren’s churches put ...”

“... 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke ...”

“... the poem shows Sexton’s craft, honed with advice from John Holmes, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Lowell. Retrieved at the last moment from her ‘bone pile’ of discards to fill out the book, it had gone through 19 drafts before Sexton achieved what Middlebrook calls the ‘double “I” ’ of the stanza and refrain. It was not craft, however, that ...”

“... into an environment of stimulating disorder and complexity. As in his earlier books, he draws on Robert Park and other members of the Chicago school of sociologists for whom urban culture amounted to an experiencing of ‘differences of class, age, race and taste outside the familiar territory of oneself’. Indeed, they held, the stimulation in a city ...”

“... of the Somme and third Ypres that shaped Liddell Hart’s thoughts. Sir Michael Howard is Robert E. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University, we are told on the dust-jacket, and a very fine American university professor he is too. So what? Scholars have always been itinerant if not outright vagabonds, so why should he not be ...”

“... does not seem to have been told that it was dangerous to fly through the cloud. (I recommend Robert Milliken’s No Conceivable Injury: The Story of Britain and Australia’s Nuclear Cover-Up, 1986.) The chief omission in the book concerns plutonium. Though we are told in great detail how the nuclear device was made and fired, we learn next to nothing ...”

“... of sexual practices’ – as if revelations of Scott Fitzgerald’s alcoholic excesses, Robert Frost’s nastiness and pettiness, Philip Larkin’s racism, or Roald Dahl’s arrogance had not tempered readers’ adulation. While she herself has written a biography of John Dos Passos as well as books on Ellen Glasgow, Plath and Stein, Wagner-Martin ...”

“... Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, Robert Ryan and Cary Grant must have had some kind of good time, but no one gets to have much fun in Higham’s book. Higham explains with nice elaboration that, with women, Hughes ‘preferred intermammary intercourse – making love between a woman’s breasts ...”

“... The Open Work is on ‘The Structure of Bad Taste’.) One pioneer of Modernist fiction, Robert Musil, remarked that the novel existed in order to destroy kitsch. But also, perhaps, to make the right, the new use of it? The ‘heroism’ of Belbo, like the parenthood of Lia and Casaubon, is not unlike the ‘weight’ of Tereza, heroine of ...”

“... is a pity that in 1987 Wintour allowed himself to be inveigled into resuming hostilities through Robert Maxwell’s forlorn London Daily News.) The return of Max Hastings to the paper on which he made his name – first as a rumbustious editor of the Londoner’s Diary from 1975 to 1976 and then as the insouciant liberator of Port Stanley in 1982 – has at ...”