“... 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 ...”

“... to experiment. It plays host to some unlikely double acts, with the ‘sentency stanzas’ of Robert Frost found alongside the ‘stanzaic sentences’ of Gertrude Stein, and it stretches from Whitman to Ashbery, both innovators in poetical-paragraphical style – ‘big blocks of words, prosy chunks that in the sequential and cumulative effects can be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Huichol economy. But they bear little resemblance to the traditional works from which they derive. Robert Zingg, the anthropologist who introduced Huichol art to the West in the 1930s, collected not yarn paintings but gourd and clay bowls, decorated with patterns in subdued earth tones and designed to be left as votive objects in sacred spots. Creating such ...”

“... copies of Peruvian nuns’ habits, or whatever. A great deal of Westwood’s work brings to mind Robert Frost’s remark about ‘playing tennis with the net down’. Which is to say, if you choose, as Westwood has done for much of her career, to ignore commercial imperatives, then creating innovative fashion – exploring the ‘aesthetic effect of a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and forty years later, Nicholas’s grandson and namesake became a singing boy in the household of Robert Cecil, where he learned the lute and viol. The first of young Lanier’s (for want of a better term) diplomatic missions came in 1611, when Cecil sent him to Venice. Musicians and artists were often used as couriers and spies, and Lanier had the advantage ...”

“... the Church, his brother Jacques as an intermediary with the Army, and promoted another brother, Robert, to a leading foreign-trade position. Both Jacques and Robert went on to become enormously rich industrial magnates. In addition, Mitterrand appointed Jean-Christophe’s mother-in-law as a deputy Minister of ...”

“... will not help us to understand anything about the politics of émigré groups. Better to turn to Robert Johnston’s excellent New Mecca, New Babylon: Paris and the Russian Exiles 1920-19451, which has languished in neglect, just possibly because it appeared from a Canadian university press. Both Johnston and ...”

“... They include Mr Gerald Albertini, The Rt Hon. Peter Archer MP, Miss Amanda Aspinall, Dr Robert Aspinall, The Duke of Atholl, Miss Julie Battersea, Mr Tom Begg, Dr Kurt Benirschke, Mr Robin Birley, Mr Anthony Blond, Mr Robert Boutwood, Mr Claus von Bülow, Mr Timothy Cassel, The Hon. Mr Alan Clark, Sir David Crouch ...”

“... Vendler to distort major figures helps her discriminate among lesser planets. Her inclusion of Robert Hayden, for example, is bold and welcome. Moreover, her promise to present writers ‘whole’ has more chance of being fulfilled with subsidiary figures. When Eliot judged anthologies less just to major than minor poets, he was, as often, lending his ...”

“... landed on top of his victim in a terminal embrace, after which the body was sold to the anatomist Robert Knox. Hare turned King’s evidence, and after a trial which ended early on Christmas morning 1828, his confederate was hanged. The woman Burke lived with, Helen MacDougal, received a verdict of not proven: she had been ably defended by Henry Cockburn. A ...”

“... commonly posed or faked, to its over-simplistic headlines and its unintentional absurdities. Robert Kee’s The World We Left Behind shows that one can make up an interesting and agreeable book almost solely from this source. It isn’t ‘social history’, since, as it moves from 1 January 1939 to 31 December, it is largely concerned with ...”

“... Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of American adolescent, who has discovered that machine civilisation has no interest in his having read Blake’). Riding ...”