“... do not share and ‘which they have not sufficient imagination to realise’. Pat Barker shows how Robert Graves – arguing that even if you change your mind you shouldn’t break a contract already signed – succeeds in smothering Sassoon’s protest (he’d also chucked his MC in the Mersey) by pulling strings and getting him sent to Craiglockhart. What ...”

“... cheeks in the hope that he might open his eyes for a moment and say hello or goodbye’ – about Robert Graves in Majorca, and about an old lady singing: Forty-four and forty-five Am I dead or am 1 alive? I know but I don’t care. I know about despair. This intensely personal structure of image and reference ensures that Blackburn is always present in her ...”

“... assistant curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art when Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg were making Action Painting famous; and he and John Ashbery, his friend and contemporary, must have felt their poetry belonged in tandem with that school. O’Hara’s ‘Why I am not a painter’ doesn’t tell us why he is not a painter, but ...”

“... The end-papers of Stepsons show that classic of nostalgia, a family long ago at tea in a summer garden. A laughing aunt clutches a terrier; ranged round the table are a baleful grandmother, an alert little girl, a father scarcely visible and two boys whose faces rend the heart. Gentle, vulnerable, unbearably tense, they are poised for flight. Opposite, as far off as possible, sits their enemy, the Scottish Gerwoman, the stepmother of this tragic autobiographical novel ...”

“... the sake of plain speaking, the account Suetonius gives of Tiberius’s goatish habits on Capri; Robert Graves’s translation is sufficiently graphic for most tastes. The Middle Ages and Renaissance pass with incomprehensible anecdotes about lusty millers, many pages of Rabelais, Aretino’s account of a gang-bang. There is the odd snippet of useful ...”

“... example to enthusiastic religious groups, or to wayward individuals, served certain purposes. That Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy was, as Johnson thought, magisterial, and unread. Above all, that madness was proximate to Reason, indeed twinned to the idea of ‘Reason’, and that madness was the secret history of the Enlightenment, its exhausted ...”

“... established icons such as Salome were given a homosexual sub-text. New icons, most notably Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde dealt with the myth of men’s double lives. This heralded the beginning of what Showalter calls the Gay Gothic. Finally ‘the masculine and homosocial “romance” of adventure and quest’ offered as a vehicle ...”

“... to Moscow in sanitised form in order to ingratiate itself with the Soviet Union). The late Robert Maxwell, the publisher, and Nicholas Davies, the former foreign editor of the Daily Mirror, have inconsequential British bit parts in the saga as told by Hersh. But Maxwell’s Jewish origins, his escape from the holocaust, his identification with Israel ...”

“... yawning fissures left by Sassoon and Owen and Graves. But from the Laureate none was forthcoming. Robert Bridges was too aggressively uncommitted, and perhaps too honest a poet, to do the right thing. (When he went to the Palace in 1913 to receive the office he snapped at Lord Stamfordham, who was in attendance, ‘I don’t want any of your Stars and ...”

“... Not long ago I, too, was browsing in the Huntingdon files and found a large box of letters from Robert Conquest to Amis; the other side of the correspondence was missing, and what was there contained lots of limericks and few confessional items for the use of any future biographer of Conquest, possibly Salwak. It seemed somehow a slightly dingy way of ...”

“... that ‘the etching on page 187 does not portray Professor Jean Martin Charcot, but Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac.’ Technically the most impressive thing in the book is a 90-page letter from Bella describing her European tour and brutal political education, with the accelerating development of her mind signalled by a transition from sing-song ...”

“... studies of other cultures. Lloyd’s paper on right and left in Greek philosophy was inspired by Robert Hertz’s anthropological work on the distinction. Today, when far more Classical scholars are aware of work in the social sciences, and when, since the mid-Seventies, it has even been possible to take a first degree in Ancient History and Social ...”

“... a smile of disbelief when Crimp ponderously discusses which is the more revolutionary art form: Robert Mapplethorpe’s nudes (appropriating the style of ‘classical’ photography for explicitly gay eroticism) or Sherrie Levine’s re-photographs of earlier photographs of Ed Weston (appropriating quite literally the material of classical photography, in ...”

“... never allowed any one minister a monopoly of power; but he underplays the monopoly enjoyed by Robert Cecil in the 1590s, which Cecil himself looked back on with regret once he had lost it in the next reign. And the depiction of the weak and bullied James VI is frankly simplistic – indeed, arguably simply wrong. MacCaffrey’s footnotes are mainly ...”

“... Thoreau and the New England Enlightenment, worked as a volunteer in the Presidential campaigns of Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. She seemed to have a brilliant career in the US before her: in 1970 the Washington Post published a gushing profile of her. But she was profoundly distressed – seems to have felt betrayed, even – by the assassinations of ...”