“... letters’ in an antique shop in Arezzo. Whether 19th-century or 21st, the tale has echoes of Robert Browning’s discovery in Florence in June 1860, at the market in the Piazza di San Lorenzo, of a collection of documents relating to a Roman murder case from 1698. ‘The old yellow book’, as Browning came to refer to it, formed the basis of his ...”

“... the story’s most appealing character, a refugee from the works of Calvino’s favourite writer, Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr Trelawney it is who performs the operation. This is a happy ending, but for the story’s youthful narrator it is also the moment of childhood’s end: Dr Trelawney, the tippling medic, leaves on a British ship, ‘hitched on board ...”

“... writers and critics came and went. Literature was a vocation in those days, not a profession. For Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell, disciples of those exemplary teacher-critics John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, criticism was an essential component of a literary career. And for the critics, the obverse was true: Lionel ...”

“... O’. Her price, 5s. ‘She riggles her a—e su’ cantily.’ The description of this prime young filly, taken from the Edinburgh publication A Genuine List of Sporting Ladies (c. 1770) is typical of many entries from whores’ directories included by Peter Wagner in Eros Revived. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, published regularly between 1760 ...”

“... though, are the sensuous ‘Dream of Zinc Cream’, on body-surfing, and Mr James’s tribute to Robert Hughes’s magnificent The Fatal Shore, the book in which the story of the convicts in Australia, related in many accounts, is finally unforgettably told. This essay is amongst other things a passionate defence of the benefits expatriation has brought to a ...”

“... post-war foreign policy ‘establishment’: Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen, George Kennan, Robert Lovett, John McCloy and Averell Harriman. All were men whose influence derived less from their official station than from their social position, their professional and intellectual accomplishments, their personal prestige and their friendship with one ...”

“... for it seems to me that these 480 large pages constitute a crib-cum-sourcebook for any academic young person with access to 25 pounds. Merely to list the topics treated in one section of the book, that devoted to the structure of language, is to indicate material for a primary course in general and applied linguistics: linguistic levels, typology and ...”

“... attributed to Hobbes, will be dismayed to find it re-attributed to one of his closest friends, Robert Payne. Another tract, of considerable importance as it has generally been taken to be Hobbes’s first major work of philosophy, the ‘Short Tract on First Principles’, has also recently been re-attributed to Payne, correctly in Malcolm’s ...”

“... even liberal, white males (Jack Kemp). The logic was simple enough. Starting off with Robert Dole, the quintessential tough-guy white male candidate, the wounded veteran (= ‘war hero’ in current parlance), a man’s man of few words, the Convention would have been a total failure if it had unfolded as a celebration of manly virtues. That would ...”

“... has been to seek for experience instead of youth ... The inexperience and haste in decision of young leaders are disadvantages which sometimes accompany their youthful energy, but they alone have the qualities which ensure success.’ The youthful and inexperienced naval officer Robert Scott was taken up by Markham and ...”

“... succession of overlaid associations and reappropriated meanings. Precisely because Che died so young and in combat, and because his literary remains are so unrevised and fragmentary, he can avoid all the failure and discredit that a 67-year-old Ernesto Guevara de la Serna would have had to tackle in his memoirs. Perhaps there is now enough hard evidence to ...”

“... to earn the right to the luxury of practising his art’. Heaney represents in similar fashion Robert Lowell’s year in prison as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Lowell was ‘earning his poetic rights by service in the unpoetic world of jail’. Elsewhere, Heaney asks: ‘What right has poetry to its quarantine?’Heaney’s notion ...”

“... have the scars to show for it’. He is doubtless thinking of his earlier novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), and two collections of stories, Unions (1911) and Three Women (1924). Perhaps also of his plays, The Enthusiasts (1921) and Vinzenz and the Girlfriend of Important Men (1924), and a great many articles and essays. He would like now to ...”

“... turned out to be heterogeneous, polyethnic or not ethnic at all. (Geary studied at Vienna as a young man and maintains strong links with colleagues there. His work prompts reflection on why this major effort to rethink identity should have gone on in Austria, ‘which had long basked in the myth of “the first victim of Nazi aggression” while enjoying ...”

“... a piece of double-entry book-keeping of the soul, or as a spiritual equivalent to the microscope Robert Hooke was using in the 1660s to count the hairs on a flea’s leg. What makes Pepys matter as a writer is the fact that he is a man totting up his sins before God, and a man out to take sexual favours and greedily sum them up, and a man who works ...”