“... his first book of art history, Form and Meaning: Writings on the Renaissance and Modern Art by Robert Klein, which includes an intriguing essay on ‘the eclipse of the work of art’. Soon Bois is obsessed with the transformations in American art glimpsed in the pages of Artforum, and contrives to visit the United States as an exchange student. Though ...”

“... of The Magic Flute (all of this under the auspices of the American director Peter Sellars). Robert Lowell meant to write a libretto and duly boned up with intensive attendance at the New York Met, but never delivered. John Ashbery has not, so far as I know, produced a libretto – only the poem, ‘Syringa’, specially composed for a setting by Elliott ...”

“... love for each other was central and permanent: ‘other interests – even other love – cannot alter it.’ Curiously, it seems to have been most threatened, not by illicit sexual attraction, but by Edward’s lack of respect for her socialism and her individuality: a bitter but generalised letter suddenly resolves itself into a particular grudge, at once ...”

“... comparison with the English poet gives no idea of Magowan’s poetry, nor does this at the end of Robert Peters’s Introduction: ‘I am reminded, finally, of that stunning moment in Alfred Tennyson’s neglected masterpiece “Maud”, where his hero, confronting madness, meditates on the fragility of the human brain, seen via the image of a seashell. Like ...”

“... per annum, 75 per cent of the EEC total.’ The key word here – for Keiller, as well as his alter ego – is surely ‘project’, just as the key fact is its close juxtaposition with … a fact. The essays in this collection – which Keiller has arranged in chronological order – were written over some thirty years, the ...”

“... Britain (how wonderful it would be to substitute ‘high’ for ‘late’!) who uses the Whig alter ego to comment indirectly upon his own time. Rare are such openly expressed sentiments as ‘our age’s preference, in intellectual history, for the subversive and rancorous over the official and self-congratulatory’. Even here, the irony is strong, the ...”

“... debate in academic and cultural life in America. Her subjects range from the attempts to suppress Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs (the famous print of Mapplethorpe with a whip inserted into his anus is reproduced in evidence) to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, to the way the exposé of Paul de Man’s early anti-Semitic writings has been used to ...”

“... novels began to be rediscovered in the 1970s. While researching his screenplay for Chinatown, Robert Towne came across Ask the Dust and took up Fante’s cause. He optioned the novel and persuaded Francis Ford Coppola to do the same for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned ...”

“... to make everything and everyone fit into place – the traditional role of the epic writer. His alter ego Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom thinks about this while driving home in Rabbit, Run (1960): ‘He thinks, My Valley, my home … Every corner locks against a remembered corner in his mind; every crevice, every irregularity in the paint clicks against a nick ...”

“... meticulous. At one end of the spectrum lurk the sex murderers in The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Robert and Caroline, whose actions lead their victim’s girlfriend to surmise that ‘the imagination, the sexual imagination’, embodies ‘a powerful single organising principle’ which distorts ‘all relations, all truth’. The incestuous children in The ...”

“... and Brazzaville). It will doubtless be the same in 2002 – which is why Chirac receives Robert Mugabe in such splendour at the Elysée, conscious that Zimbabwe’s 14,000 troops in the Congo make him a key player in such marchandise. Not that France has a monopoly on playing Machiavelli in Africa: Herman Cohen, Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of ...”

“... fact that Mandelson has proved himself peculiarly bad at managing his own political career cannot alter the fact that he had, as Donald Macintyre makes clear, an instinctive grasp of the dynamics of the new media-led democracy, a skill certainly needed to pull off the Houdini-like feat of rescuing Labour from the state to which it had sunk in the early ...”

“... One is the principled, compassionate statesman who lays down his life for his convictions in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. The other, more or less diametrically opposed, is the zealot and vindictive persecutor of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, who takes savage delight in flogging heretics. The attempt to claim, for one agenda or another, this ...”

“... more ‘restaurant-style’ options (often devised by celebrity chefs). What they can’t do is alter the basic quality of the food, because the market provides them with very few alternatives – this is the food that allows the hospital to remain within budget while making money for the suppliers. School food and hospital food have got worse since their ...”

“... own son, John, who also became an adept fiddler, like his grandfather. Clare felt an affinity with Robert Burns, collected songs as Burns did, and during his asylum years wrote a number of songs in the Scottish vernacular. Clare says in his autobiography that both his parents were ‘illiterate to the last degree’. Concerned to dispel the myths, Bate points ...”