“... the little girl sang, ‘Each morning I am something new ...’ Schwartz’s literary executor, Robert Philips, thinks this is one of Schwartz’s permanent contributions to 20th-century American poetry, but I don’t think he can be serious. There are occasional strikes, such as ‘Mr Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon’, and he never lost his gift for good ...”

“... an unanswered question, so too, does the history of National Socialism – which a book like Robert Harbison’s recent Deliberate Regression: The disastrous history of Romantic individualism in thought and art, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to 20th-century fascism (1980) interprets as dreamfully as Steiner recreates Hitler. The reason why I quote ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... influenza. If he struck many of those who met him, from Alfred Jarry to Max Jacob to Picasso to Robert Delaunay, as larger than life, as the avant-garde spirit incarnate, and if his long poems, like those of Whitman and O’Hara, seem to expand and prolong themselves as effortlessly as amoebas in a petri dish, then beneath the shifting decors and personae a ...”

“... to co-opt him as chief controversialist against the great Counter-Reformation polemicist Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, and questions of political allegiance and the relative powers of king and pope loomed large in their controversies. Andrewes undoubtedly held a very high religious theory of monarchy, but his role as most favoured court prelate occasionally ...”

“... the delicate, ‘fey-looking’ Duncan, has a weird job in a candle factory: his old friend Robert Fraser can’t believe it when he finds him there, working in what is essentially sheltered employment for people too damaged to do anything else. Plus, Duncan has moved in with an elderly man he calls Uncle Horace, although he is no relation, ‘the man ...”

“... of two and lived with a succession of relatives; at the age of five he went to boarding-school. Robert McCrum calculates that ‘in total, Wodehouse saw his parents for barely six months between the ages of three and 15.’ After he left Dulwich College, to which he remained deeply attached for the rest of his life, his father got him a job at the Hong Kong ...”

“... flowers” and went to bed, as he himself declared, “dreaming of Nijinsky”.’ On 29 May 1913 Nijinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps opened at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Several bars into the opening movement, people in the audience, who had paid double-price to get in, began to jeer and scream at the tops of their voices. The ...”

“... It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese ...”

“... was heavily revised in 1844) and the vivid anti-war poem Captain Sword and Captain Pen (1835). Robert Morrison’s volume on the piecemeal journalism of 1822-38 gives a very good sense of Hunt the critic, showing his extraordinary eye for new talent (the reviews of the young Carlyle, Browning and Tennyson are particularly insightful). Charles Mahoney’s ...”

“... O’Neill’s imagination, he saw himself as a novelist, as the latest of his many biographers, Robert Dowling, points out. After a near fatal suicide attempt in 1912 – the episode is chronicled in the recently discovered short play ‘Exorcism’ – he gave up the romance of death for the romance of art. ‘So here’s looking forward to the new ...”

“... people violently and often and at such moments she was not silent, often in unexpected ways. When Robert Graves sold a copy of her book The Sleeping Beauty, which she had inscribed to him ‘in admiration’, she bought it back and resold it after adding: ‘I wrote this dedication at a time when Robert Graves was a ...”

“... number of other members of the Movement for Democratic Change were arrested, tortured and beaten. Robert Mugabe had banned all MDC meetings and rallies in the hope of suppressing the MDC completely before this year’s elections. The local churches entered the fray and organised a prayer meeting in Highfield, a suburb of Harare. Tsvangirai drove to the ...”

“... and took up 16 full columns in the Times, the longest single dispatch in the paper’s history. In May 1936, he entered Addis Ababa with the triumphant Italian army, and saw ‘an imperial capital in ruins – buildings still burning, the stinking dead still lying in the streets, gutted houses and stores gaping blackly and emptily at us as we drove by’. His ...”

“... of her first novel, Wise Blood. Her friend Sally Fitzgerald, the wife of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, broke the news, which effectively terminated all dreams of escaping Andalusia, the farm outside Milledgeville run by her mother. There O’Connor spent the last 12 years of her life, raising peacocks and writing ferocious stories populated by ...”