“... a wonderful poem by Les Murray, terrific poet and world-class fatty, called ‘Quintets for Robert Morley’. The poem begins: Is it possible that hyper- ventilating up Parnassus I have neglected to pay tribute to the Stone Age aristocracy?    I refer to the fat. This raises the question of who were the first fatties. It may be that – without ...”

“... richer, more intimate affair than, say, proportional representation; but the post-colonial critic Robert Young has recently reminded us of just what racist, imperial baggage this apparently suggestive notion carries with it from the anthropologising 19th century. Jacqueline Rose has her own suspicions of that brand of literary politics for which culture is ...”

“... as well as of his ‘sordid death’. So is the mystery all about homophobia? The director Robert Aldrich thought so. ‘Jimmy Whale was the first guy who was blackballed because he refused to stay in the closet.’ Mark Gatiss has an interesting interpretation of what this means: not the flaunting of gayness but a settled homosexual relationship, the ...”

“... Alemannische Gedichte, which became very famous, earning him the reputation of a sort of German Robert Burns. Goethe admired the poems greatly, and Jean Paul declared he never tired of reading them. Thus when he took on the editorship of the Rheinländische Hausfreund he was already known as a writer; and soon the almanac was being read, and items being ...”

“... Taupo resurfaced. The auctioneers J. Robineau et Cie sold their Lot 391 to the American dealer Robert Lyman of New York State. It is unclear who he was acting for, although Norman Williams believes he was buying on behalf of a syndicate in Canada. The stamp was estimated at 50,000 frs; it sold for 110,000 frs or about £10,500. Two years later it finally ...”

“... ends with the death of the main character: ‘Such a death, in a mining accident during which Robert has been trying to help his companions, is both plausible and tragic, but it is also in a measure defeatist.’ The People of the Ruins ‘glumly looks forward to Europe ... a century after it has been taken over and wrecked by Communist revolution. All ...”

“... the Connaught? Naipaul’s conversation on this occasion is admirable, too. Rather than denouncing Robert Lowell’s poetry as bogus (‘His poems are very good,’ is Theroux’s interesting contribution) he has the much more brilliant inspiration that the madness was bogus. (‘Total con, total con.’ I said: ‘He goes to mental ...”

“... ominous gadgetry, the endless neon and rain. But Gibson – ‘very much under the influence of Robert Stone’, as well as Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs – was among the first to find a centre-stage role for information technology in his future scenarios. His stories were set in a world of porous borders, where multinationals and crime cartels had ...”

“... symmetry, to 1984. The brother is romantically attached to the insurrectionary tradition of Robert Emmet, a tie which has left him and his sister on the margins of the new society. The balancing of hope and frailty at the mid-point of the century is masterly: ‘The past receded a little with the day; time yet unspent was left to happen as fearfully as ...”

“... sits near my desk as a permanent challenge, like the Pandora’s box opened at the end of the Robert Aldrich film Kiss Me Deadly. A casket that contains the sound of apocalypse, blinding enlightenment, hurt. Dilworth’s boxes fold death in a tender embrace: we have only his word for the rituals that have been observed. And he’s not telling. There is a ...”

“... an experimental literary culture to sustain it – particularly in the 1970s and 1980s (a period Robert Sheppard has called the ‘utopia of dissent’), when Basil Bunting was president of the Poetry Society and Eric Mottram was editing Poetry Review. Certain key figures emerge as influences or promoters, but the tradition ... is long, dissenting and ...”

“... sense. There isn’t much she hasn’t read, or doesn’t remember. Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tennyson, George MacDonald, Charles Reade, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Conan Doyle, Du Maurier, and plenty more. Her literary memory is a compendium of every syllabus in Victorian literature ...”

“... because he looks on life with a dead glance and can see only dead souls around him? Belinsky, Robert Jackson wrote in Dialogues with Dostoevsky, ‘well understood that Gogol’s mirror was crooked. But Russian reality, Russian man, in Belinsky’s view, was in the profoundest sense unformed, grotesque, disfigured.’ Ma perceives his characters and their ...”

“... reads: ‘According to Jo’s diary Hopper suffers from depression and frequently reads poems of Robert Frost.’ The audio tour claims that Two Comedians (1966), Hopper’s last canvas, is ‘unusually autobiographical’ and demonstrates ‘the extent to which Hopper’s work was a collaborative process with his wife as model, muse and ...”

“... the same structure, and fills in the blanks. In 1973, writing of Central Park, the land artist Robert Smithson described as ‘dialectical landscapes’ those areas that will not fit easily the categories of urban, rural, cultivated or natural. Defiant Gardens concludes with a consideration of what we might call the dialectical garden. In cities across ...”