“... cosmic scale; of Tsvetaeva’s it was poetry. Yet it is true that even as one reads of the truly savage treatment accorded her by the Russian émigré community in Paris, one helplessly sympathises with them. If by some miracle one could undo the tragedy of Tsvetaeva’s suicide in 1941 and bring her back to earth to finish her allotted time, one might ...”

“... now recognise, in G.S. Fraser’s anthology Poetry Now (1956). It appeared again that same year in Robert Conquest’s anthology New Lines, and I fear I did not then recognise in it, as I do now, perhaps the finest poem in that volume, and certainly the most surprising. It is, I suppose and hope, well-known: but it isn’t famous – as it deserves to be. It ...”

“... have come from transatlantic scholars such as John C. Cairns, Philip Bankwitz, Telford Taylor and Robert O. Paxton. Eleanor M. Gates might modestly disclaim inclusion in such distinguished company. But she has produced a splendid book which is both instructive and moving. She is not much interested in the military operations per se, but excels in her ...”

“... restored the position of the monarchy by reducing the power of the great earls, but Odo of Bayeux, Robert of Mortain and Roger of Montgomery, with incomes of more than £2,000 a year from their English lands alone, were all, to borrow Warren Hollister’s term, ‘super-magnates’. True, in William I they faced a king richer in land and cash than Edward the ...”

“... it was all about: ‘I do not know of any new poet,’ AE wrote in a review, ‘who has such a savage splendour of epithet or who can marry the wild word so fittingly to the wild thought.’ Not everyone would take that as praise, perhaps: but evidently Campbell did. At least he went on, to the end of his life, writing savagely and thinking wildly. The ...”

“... choirboys and girls of the 1940s. Can Modern Baptists be true to life? We may hope so. Carl Robert Pickens is occasionally called Bobby, but more often Mr Pickens, in a Dickensian, Pickwickian way. He has many problems. He has just been sacked from his job as assistant manager at the Sonny Boy Bargain Store in Tula Springs – partly because of the ...”

“... ancient culture’ (almost echoing the phrases he elsewhere applied to Trinity) while ‘relics of savage ignorance survive at their doors.’ Abercromby Square is not as secluded as Trinity Great Court, but it seems a little hard on Liverpool; it is difficult to believe that for Frazer there was no unconscious reference to his present situation. A life like ...”

“... The last label is absurd – Elias had a rooted dislike of both colonialist arrogance and noble-savage romanticism. Yet The Civilising Process has an insistent logic running through it, a strong whiff of evolutionary humanism. The distinction on which the book rests, between a rational, refined, mechanical French ‘civilisation’ and an ...”

“... bands. One of the earliest was the Cyfarthfa band, in the iron-smelting centre of Merthyr Tydfil. Robert Crawshay, the owner of the Cyfarthfa works, in effect created a private orchestra. He employed a family of musicians from Bradford, members of London theatre orchestras and strolling players; and, like some Renaissance prince or 17th-century cardinal, gave ...”

“... own good, for the good of his art’. The poor fella had it coming to him. (Enright was a pretty savage reviewer in his youth himself – who isn’t? – so he probably wasn’t too bothered.) Davie’s is an assault rather than an argument, but his brutal dismissal of Enright and his oeuvre does make one wonder not just ‘What on earth was wrong with ...”

“... and medical measures, particularly those prompted by the discovery of the tubercle bacillus by Robert Koch in 1882? Were they all without merit? With pulmonary tuberculosis, there is no doubt that what doctors did to patients before the discovery and development of the main anti-tuberculosis drugs after World War Two – streptomycin, rifampicin and ...”

“... tenderness and outrageous inventions. Hagiographical prefaces to his books by Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley align him with Hart Crane and Keats as a poet vulnerable to the world and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our ...”

“... threshold’, but we were actually at ‘the terminus’.I was too young to see it in its savage heyday, but by the late 1990s the Colony Room was one of the most self-conscious places in London: the Young British Artists had moved in. The newness of the new artists disappeared faster than the fizz in their vodka tonics, but not before they’d ...”

“... there and elsewhere by Patrice Chéreau, Götz Friedrich, Ruth Berghaus, Harry Kupfer, and Robert Wilson.As Adorno argued in an autumnal and even conciliatory reflection on Wagner published several years after his savage book on the composer, ‘Wagner is the first case of uncompromising musical nominalism ... the ...”

“... The estimates for the end of the Thirties ranged from Dallin and Nicolaevsky’s ten million and Robert Conquest’s nine million (the latter figure excluded ‘criminals’) to Wheatcroft’s maximum of four to five million, Jasny’s three and a half million and Timasheff’s two million. Elaborate records in the NKVD archives reveal that about two million ...”