“... political calamities on the pampering of minorities. ‘Trump and his supporters,’ Simon Jenkins wrote in the Guardian after the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, ‘thrive on the venom of their liberal tormentors.’ Perhaps such back to front conclusions are inevitable if the centrist establishment stays silent about its own ...”

“... trotz alledem/Dass rings der Mensch die Bruderhand/dem Menschen reicht trotz alledem.’ It’s Robert Burns. ‘It’s coming yet, for a’ that,/That Man to Man the warld o’er/Shall brothers be for a’ that.’ The poet who translated it, Ferdinand Freiligrath, was soon driven out of Germany into exile. He was one of countless thousands across Europe ...”

“... of capitalism and class struggle. Marx now had a folder to himself, as did Fourier and Saint-Simon. There were new dossiers on the Stock Exchange, the Working-Class Movement, Professional Revolutionaries, the Commune, the materialist anthropology (and zoology) of the first Socialist Sects. The web was more and more complex – some would say tangled. It ...”

“... politics; from the legalisation of abortion and divorce by mutual consent to the translation of Robert Paxton’s Vichy France. He even includes an attack on French filmmakers for portraying French people as narrow-minded and racist, not to mention feminising the image of the ‘white heterosexual male’. And that was only the 1970s, before the arrival of ...”

“... She wanted her family to treat her like a boy, sometimes even signing letters to them ‘your son, Simon’. She found the idea of being an object of desire repulsive, and dressed in an outlandish way. The poet Jean Tortel remembered her as ‘a kind of bird without a body, withdrawn, in a huge black cloak which she never took off and which flapped around her ...”

“... one more film in Spain (Tristana, 1970), two more films in Mexico (The Exterminating Angel, 1962, Simon of the Desert, 1965), and six films in France (Diary of a Chambermaid, 1964, Belle de jour, 1966, The Milky Way, 1969, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972, The Phantom of Liberty, 1974, That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977).Viridiana has a number of ...”

“... they were following, in some measure and according to their capacity, the brilliant example of Robert Graves, whose coming to maturity as a poet was a matter of saying a decisive ‘goodbye’ not only to the war but to all ghosts and rubbish (including cast-off language) that threatened the living. It was in 1930 that T.S. Eliot wrote in Criterion, with ...”

“... criticism only started to emerge in full after his death, in the writings of Father Richard Simon and Reimarus. Spinoza saw the Bible as growing out of the special political ‘religious’ circumstances of the ancient Hebrews. In order to understand how they had developed, the texts had to be studied historically, philologically and contextually. The ...”

“... William Sullivan, who was then in the midst of a power struggle with J. Edgar Hoover, to visit Robert Mardian, head of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, and warn him, as Mardian later testified, that Hoover could not be trusted and might try to blackmail Nixon, as he had blackmailed other Presidents, because of the wiretap ...”

“... however invidious comparisons may be, is of a mixture of Browning, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Robert Lowell, with something of Whitman’s breezy effect of easing himself in poetry’s words. If that sounds bizarre – well, she is in many ways a bizarre writer. Her ways with rhythm and sound effects seem too spontaneous to be experimental, though they ...”

“... on Richard Shead’s excellent critical biography, currently unavailable, issued in 1973 by Simon Publications, London. Motion admits his debt in the Acknowledgements, but virtually nothing we are told hasn’t stemmed from Shead; the narrative sequence is reduplicated (Motion’s account of Constant’s first marriage, for instance, follows Shead’s ...”

“... in Elizabethan Culture’, which opens with a quotation from the 1597 diary of the astrologer Simon Foreman, purporting to describe a dream about sexually mastering Queen Elizabeth. Montrose juxtaposes this with a contemporary letter from the French Ambassador, de Maisse, describing the ageing Queen’s cleavage. The essay goes on to describe ...”

“... was a great success. Stead was to have from that time on powerful literary support: Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, Theodore Roethke, Lillian Hellman, Peter Taylor, Elizabeth Hardwick in America; Patrick White in Australia. Books previously declined were now published. There were reprints. There was an interest, and it would grow. It was all ...”

“... the season. The effect followed partly from the translation of the Iliad they’d chosen, Robert Fagles’s from 1990. Fagles goes for the choppy, hard stuff, preferring percussive consonants and end-stopped monosyllables. Some of the pastoral and domestic similes were cut, and a few of the interpolated myths were dropped. The effect was to man up an ...”

“... some more at Le Moulin d’Or in Soho before repairing to Edith’s Belgravia flat. The playwright Robert Bolt, whose work was performed by many of the family (Corin made his mark in the film version of A Man for All Seasons), expressed bafflement that Lady Redgrave put up with it: He seemed to want everything – some of it for his reputation, much of it for ...”