“... which she joins young and old together by dramatising obsessive and almost psychotic continuities. Robert Kelway, the traitor hero from The Heat of the Day, who is giving away secrets to the enemy from his job at the War Office, is traced to his childhood in peculiarly prosperous and loveless suburban surroundings – or rather not traced, for Bowen is never ...”

“... nor from Italo Calvino (who wrote a wonderful story about dinos), but from the fantasised macho alter ego of Calvin in the cartoon Calvin and Hobbes: bigger than his parents and named after himself (as Andrew Carnegie named the Diplodocus Carnegii). As for the other gender, some little girls allegedly find cuddly dinos to love and mother – while others, I ...”

“... You can follow the same trail that led to a network ban in the US on the repeat showing of a Robert Fisk documentary criticising Israel. If enough powerful people – which means enough people with control over the major public communications in the US – make enough noise on behalf of victims in their team (more deserving of interest and concern than ...”

“... foglie And the French: nous sommes telle en automne sur l’arbre la feuille (Later editions alter the lineation of both versions and slightly adjust the French wording.) Frisardi balks at the challenge of this poem, but it has been well translated by Andrew Wylie as ‘Soldiers’: ‘Stand like/trees’/autumn/leaves’ (along with many other alert ...”

“... by this explanation and ordered that Lowe be bailed and later discharged. Similarly fortunate was Robert Fisher, who sold pins. So did the Pinners’ Company of London, which didn’t like Fisher selling pins improperly. So, in October 1637, he was committed to the custody of a royal messenger on the Pinners’ complaint. The company, in its return, recited ...”

“... 1945 – the Cold War standing in this case as both analogy and warning. In Return to Cold War, Robert Legvold – a specialist in post-Soviet foreign policy and regular contributor to Foreign Affairs – sees worrying similarities between the current situation and the early stages of the Cold War (c.1948-53), focusing in particular on the rhetorical ...”

“... discussions of Don Quixote, and the cryptic allusions to the gospels, there are faint echoes of Robert Walser, W.G. Sebald and others, and nods to Kleist’s essay ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, to Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and to the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti. ‘There is no such thing as a llave universal,’ Simón is told when he gets the Spanish ...”

“... glory of the century of progress. A White Star Line poster reproduced in Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton’s collection shows the great hulk of the ship, sunlit, belching smoke out of three of its four funnels – the fourth was there only for effect – and cutting a swathe between a small sailing ship and a three-masted square rigger. A sliver of ...”

“... with some of the older children. In Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, Robert Gottlieb quotes the letter in which Dickens explains to his wife what happened: ‘Presently, we heard them come back and say to each other with some alarm: “Why, the gate’s shut, and they are all gone!” Ally began in a dismayed way to cry out, but ...”

“... felt more able to tell the story when she dipped into fiction; in Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) her alter ego, Pompey Casmilus, remembers one of his postcards: ‘“Off to Valparaiso love Daddy.” And a very profound impression of transiency they left upon me.’ Charles was charismatic, absent-minded, wayward (‘could charm the birds off the ...”

“... Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain ...”

“... knows why they happen, and nobody knows how to halt or even satisfactorily slow the degeneration. Robert Will, the neurologist at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh who heads the Government’s CJD surveillance unit, points out that although CJD is rare, we still know a great deal more about it than about many other more common neurological diseases. There ...”

“... Hump’ as Bloomsberries called her, was 11 years older than Julia. The astonishing success of Robert Elsmere (1888) made her the second most famous woman in Victorian England. Her poignant saga of a young Anglican priest who defects from the Church to rediscover God in the slums of London sold by the hundred thousand in Britain. In America, unprotected by ...”

“... sales’ and the second edition, a year later, ‘little or no sales’. But that doesn’t alter the fact that Emerson did his very best to call attention to the book, not only in America but in England. Traubel knows all this, and on several occasions tries to remind Whitman of earlier testimonies to Emerson’s help and past references to Emerson as ...”

“... the country’s emerging counter-culture, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones and Robert Creeley. It also ran a selection of the early work of a maverick graduate student in English at the University of Tulsa, Ted Berrigan. Berrigan was soon accompanying Brainard and his fellow editors, the poets Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup, on their forays ...”