“... A chorus of woe prompted by the recession of 1980? No, all remarks made in 1948, and quoted by Robert Hewison in his forthcoming cultural history of the period, In Anger. Publishers are like farmers. When times are good – as they were spectacularly during the years after 1974 when the pound was weakest abroad – it’s difficult to get them to admit ...”

“... give scope for intelligence, but it could also advance the hesitating and time-serving nitwit Robert Craigie to high judicial office. There is the even more lamentable career of Tweeddale as Secretary of State, a post which presumably had some relation to the fact that his son-in-law was prime minister, and which had a lot to do with the initial success ...”

“... himself. The translation of the title poem is his own, and there is even one poem, ‘Elegy for Robert Lowell’, originally written in English. It works too, if only as a fluent assemblage of Lowell properties: planes at Logan thunder off from the brown mass of industrial tundra with its bureaucratic moss. Huge autoherds graze on grey, convoluted, flat ...”

“... this, however valuable, is literary history narrowly conceived. A partial exception, perhaps, is Robert Ellrodt’s vast, French, phenomenological, semi-Bachelardian study of the Metaphysical sensibilité, to which he here adds a note, in a piece on ‘Angels and the Poetic Imagination from Donne to Traherne’: but Ellrodt’s yearning for a kind of ...”

“... years in government. The miasma of corruption wreathes Badenoch’s most plausible challenger, Robert Jenrick, who has been pumping out Reform-tinged jeremiads on X. Polling suggests he’d be even less popular. Given its efflux of activists and politicians to Reform, the eventual fate of the Conservatives may be as a vestigial electoral appendage, a ...”

“... on the edge of Hampstead Heath and one of the finest surviving examples of the mature designs of Robert Adam. Two years later, Lord Iveagh died, bequeathing Kenwood to the nation, along with 63 Old Master and 18th-century British paintings from his own collection, including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gainsborough and Reynolds, as an example of the ...”

“... left. Best supporting actress, Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers; best supporting actor, Robert Downey Jr in Oppenheimer; best actress, Emma Stone in Poor Things; best actor, Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers; best director, Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer. Best Picture? The word was out before Christmas, it will be Oppenheimer. There’s your big ...”

“... there would have been too upsetting.’In The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (1989), Robert Wistrich argues that for Roth ‘the world of the shtetl re-emerged as the ideal embodiment of a lost intimacy and innocence; the materialist values of the Western Bürgertum (Jewish and Gentile) represented its self-alienated antithesis.’ Roth’s ...”

“... Bardrochat, the other family house, an Arts and Crafts mansion in Ayrshire with a music room by Robert Lorimer. The genial chaos of country house life disconcerted some visitors. The photographer Lee Friedlander thought it was like ‘being in the middle of a British novel’, speculating that there were probably people who stayed the whole summer. McEwen ...”

“... emissions from vehicle engines, and on the same page is another piece on the subject by Dr Ernst-Robert Grawitz, the future chief SS medical officer and Himmler’s extermination adviser, who in 1945 killed himself, his wife and their son with hand grenades. Some of the Nazis’ lethal experiments with carbon monoxide took place at Sachsenhausen camp, just ...”

“... Blyth’s banalities, are at odds with this discordant factor, and only Sir Frederick Ashton and Robert Tear express an independent disenchantment, the former in something close to bitchiness, the latter in a more technical way: Tear was banished after choosing to sing Dov in The Knot Garden rather than Lechmere in Owen Wingrave, and there can surely be no ...”

“... Blackheath with their holdalls, or nipping round the corner from the Telegraph with a fistful of Robert Hales or Arthur Barkers. One esteemed figure at the Times used to order a taxi for noon on Friday and when it arrived he would have a flunkey load it up with art books and American encyclopedias. He would then squeeze in beside his booty and, with ...”

“... band. And the best brass-player of his generation, a black called Cato, began his career as Sir Robert Walpole’s footman before being passed, like a favourite horse or dog, first to the Earl of Chesterfield and then to the Prince of Wales and his son, the future George III. The Louis Armstrong of Augustan England ended his days, apparently, as royal ...”

“... branch of the ‘identity’ lobby spoke of the new affinity it felt with Californian poets like Robert Duncan. Again, the word ‘geography’ was used: it made geographical sense for Australians to cosy up with San Francisco. To balance the provincial angst, there were also a number of sneering cosmopolitans, but they tended not to sit on platforms. They ...”

“... American past. One result was Pariotic Gore, a vast and laborious book he did not enjoy writing. Robert Lowell called it the American Plutarch, which is ingenious but wrong. Patriotic Gore is probably, from the point of view of British readers, over-represented in Dabney’s selection, though it could be argued that the long pieces on Ulysses S. Grant and ...”