“... in order to advance their careers and secure an income. On becoming prime minister in the 1720s, Robert Walpole gave posts to six members of his family (brothers, sons and in-laws), as well as to other long-time supporters, prompting the charge that Britain was governed by a ‘Robinocracy’. As late as 1831, Earl Grey was accused of securing offices for ...”

“... contracts worth $3.5 million. Bloom appears to be a small-time wheeler-dealer. More interesting is Robert Stein, his alleged co-conspirator, who was the CPA’s Comptroller and Funding Officer for the South-Central region. Stein has been convicted of fraud and sued for embezzlement in previous business dealings with the US military in the States. He is a ...”

“... press would immediately label as evidence of kleptocracy if they happened in another country. Robert Jenrick remains housing secretary despite admitting ‘apparent bias’ in overruling planning inspectors and the local council to approve Richard Desmond’s Westferry Printworks development – 24 hours before the introduction of hefty new levies that ...”

“... the Norman Conquest’. It would take three generations to begin to recover from this ‘colossal self-inflicted cultural catastrophe’. What English architecture might have been without the Reformation is unknowable, but Brindle offers a counterfactual hint in his account of the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. The Perpendicular fan vaulting of the ...”

“... producers and translators. ‘I feel I’m getting more and more entangled in professionalism and self-exploitation,’ he wrote in 1958 to Barney Rosset, his New York publisher, ‘and that it would be really better to stop altogether than to go on with that.’ In some ways, success had a calming effect on Beckett, whose experiences during the Occupation ...”

“... judges, a backbench MP called Malcolm Craig, shows no overlap with either Hermione Lee (2006) or Robert Macfarlane (2013). The Elysian judges for 2013 are Jo Cross, a columnist whose criterion for imaginative literature is its ‘relevance’; Penny Feathers, retired from the Foreign Office and attempting to write topical thrillers; Tobias Benedict, an ...”

“... presences. In Edward, on the other hand, the Major repeatedly sees traces of a mildness and self-mockery ‘that did not go at all with his leonine features’. When a party of Oxford undergraduates drops by to goad this ‘perfectly splendid old Tory’ (‘I mean, have you even read Rousseau’s Le Contrat social?’), the reader is manipulated into ...”

“... to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble.In these seemingly sober, useful, self-deprecating sentences lurks the MacGuffin, to borrow Alfred Hitchcock’s term, that reaches its epic, mind-boggling climax in the publication, nearly a century on, of Faber’s two all-comprehending new tomes, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. The ...”

“... made such an impact on me was that it wasn’t among the ten Montale poems that appeared in Robert Lowell’s 1961 book of translations, Imitations. I am saying, I suppose, that Lowell spoiled the ground in making it accessible. At this moment I would guess that Imitations is more influential than any other aspect of Lowell’s poetic practice: the idea ...”

“... to be squeezed in. The last mentioned is the work of Rosie Jackson, who also reprints Frieda’s self-portrait Not I but the Wind. Ms Jackson believes it time to correct what she takes to be the hostile general view of Frieda, and to show that her insights into Lawrence’s work are important ‘for us in our current crises around gender’. What she takes ...”

“... and articles, why is Steinbeck the subject of only fifteen or twenty?’ That is the question. Few self-respecting writers cite Steinbeck as an influence; even those critics who admit to once having had a soft spot for his work attribute it to the unformed tastes of adolescence. One grows out of him, like acne. The small band of writers who do admire Steinbeck ...”

“... is first and foremost a deliberate verbal artefact, full of vertiginous punning and Post-Modernist self-consciousness. At one point Christopher, the foetus-narrator, expounds his own literary genealogy, which includes Tristram Shandy, Nikolai Gogol, Pierre Menard (author of Don Quixote) and many others of what he calls the ‘Sons of La Mancha’. Fuentes has ...”

“... which can only end in disaster. On the right, commentators such as Lord Carver, Enoch Powell and Robert McNamara have argued that deterrence means that nuclear weapons would never be used even if war broke out. Thus the threat to unleash them is increasingly incredible. As Mr Powell put it, ‘the crucial question is whether there is any stage of a European ...”

“... The 13 remaining essays, whose authors include Stanley Fish, Louis Montrose, Stephen Orgel and Robert Weimann, concentrate on Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. A number of these essays are concerned with representation in a fairly strict sense of the term – representations of the self, of gender, of power, of ...”

“... earlier books, and The End of the Line is full of words to get readers reaching for their Grand Robert: un caïman, une chroniqueuse judiciaire, une menthe verte, des estaminets, des répètes, un cyrard, des demi-soldes, la HSP, des cothurmes, des pneumatiques, un vis-à-vis, le zinc, des chahuteuses, and so on. Yet these tokens of a second identity – a ...”