“... the ones everybody was reading, all published by Faber: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell and, of course, Heaney. It seems extraordinary, now, that my father had known several of them. Larkin had been his friend in Belfast (and my mother’s boss in the library at Queen’s), and, later, at the University of Essex in the 1970s, Lowell ...”

“... to the hyper-rational world. He didn’t pose as a guru like Ken Kesey, Carlos Castaneda or Robert Bly; nor did he adopt the unhinged expressionism of Hunter S. Thompson. He never wanted to build a movement, evangelise for drug use or found a school. Instead, he leaves space for scepticism and the possibility that there’s more than one way of ...”

“... the intention is different. She never rejected first-person experience as a basis of her lyrics; Robert Lowell’s Notebook poems were an early influence (‘When Lowell relaxed into the sonnet form, he gave us a new kind of poetry notebook,’ she once wrote). In light of this, her poems’ fragmentary brevity suggests a kind of exploded sonnet, and they ...”

“... Crusade, the only eyewitness view from Byzantium, in which she portrays the Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemond with horrified fascination. In a period that witnessed the gradual loss of Asia Minor to the Turks, the emergence of Venice and Pisa as maritime powers and the formulation of holy war ideologies in western Christendom and ...”

“... You wanted us to be more British than the British!’Leroy comes top of his trainee class, quoting Robert Peel’s philosophy of policing to his teachers. His superiors ask him to be the face of a recruitment campaign. But when he is dispatched to his own North London neighbourhood he is forced to confront the reality of his institutional role. On his first ...”

“... radioactive debris that is now embedded in glacial ice at both poles. In his foreword to Strata, Robert Mac­farlane imagines a ‘far-future William Smith’ who is ‘prospecting the strata of the Anthropocene’ and discoversthe trace-fossils of billions of plastic bottles, chicken and swine bones in fabulous abund­ance, the crushed rubble of our ...”

“... the 19th century’s belief in its own ‘rational religion’, and nowhere more so than in India. Robert Caldwell, a young missionary to Tinnevelly (now Tirunelveli) in Tamil Nadu in the 1830s, was exasperated by the response to his preaching: ‘To every … argument they mutter in reply: “Who has seen heaven? Who has seen hell?”’ Their own religion ...”

“... later. (A hazy episode from the 1972 campaign involves Frank Sheeran, the hitman portrayed by Robert De Niro in The Irishman, allegedly organising a truck drivers’ strike on behalf of the Bidens, preventing the delivery of a newspaper carrying ads for Joe’s opponent.) Schreckinger conveys an impression of Jim as a man who never developed much ...”

“... cowering in their consulting-rooms, and better certainly than any political scientist. Take Robert McKenzie, the television psephologist and master of the swingometer, a figure well-known in the Sixties, but now safely dead – and, as we shall see, without heirs who might want to sue on his behalf. A TV producer once had the idea of filming Abse and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”