“... 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 ...”

“... religion. The reason for its recent resurrection by libertarians of the New Right, and especially Robert Nozick, is not far to seek. We have strong moral intuitions about the importance of bodily integrity: rape and torture are perhaps the worst evils that humans can experience. These intuitions can be framed in the language of self-ownership: it is because ...”

“... saw too many difficulties. A new university ‘would necessarily be “a very poor affair”, as Robert Birley, the British Educational Adviser, sniffed’. Along with academic snobbery went ‘an acid tinge of anti-American feeling’: the brash Allies were making a vulgar bid for popularity, and so on. They even had the effrontery to appoint an American ...”

“... She managed to get herself engaged to two gentiles, provocatively changed her name from Levin to Robert (thus adopting the family name her younger brother Ludwig had taken upon his conversion), and finally chose for her husband the much younger minor diplomat and liberal journalist Karl Varnhagen von Ense. The salon she had led from her home before her ...”

“... implications of the planters’ feelings of guilt. Writing to a British merchant in 1721, Robert Carter of Nomini Hall lamented to his correspondent that both of them were ‘muckworms – that is, in other words, too great lovers of this world’. Were they less attached to it, he added, the ‘thoughts of having a little more white and yellow earth ...”