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“... from stories which make no claim to ‘truth’. ‘Dear reader,’ he wrote in a typically self-conscious style (and here I paraphrase), the story I am about to tell differs from Hamlet in that it is true. He went on: ‘I am a historian, not a writer of fiction, and have written the book in the conviction that the duty of a historian is to tell true ...”

“... lash to and fro like a dog shaking a rat. Compare this work of nature with Spiral Jetty, which Robert Smithson built out into Great Salt Lake in Utah thirty years ago. It’s more neatly coiled than the spit at Rudha Cailleach. Both change continually, the one in its shape, the other in its invisibility; indeed Salt Lake rose recently and drowned the ...”

“... of 1988, which read the work as determined by personal feeling, and the more scholarly accounts of Robert Ackerman and Hugh Lloyd-Jones which located her ‘at the heart’ of the (so-called) Cambridge Ritualists. Reluctant to offer an alternative myth, yet anxious to avoid already trampled ground, Beard instead explores Harrison’s formative years in ...”

“... and to death’: Kenya under Kenyatta was at peace and flourished. But the description fits Robert Mugabe all too well. Mugabe and Mbeki think that provided the Government is a self-described ‘national liberation movement’, people ought to be content, but they aren’t. Zimbabweans, black and white, want a liberal ...”

“... could never have written anything as unpleasant as that. But he could have been the target of Robert Browning’s jibe (in ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’) about ‘that dear middle-age these noodles praise’, when, ‘you’ll say, once all believed,’ from Henry VIII to the ploughman with his paternoster. So it was not a book above and beyond ...”

“... it to keep his pills in, it’s as if he were getting stripped for action, or being barbered like Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver. (It’s also a sumptuous image of death, rather ahead of Dalí.) I want, if I can, to avoid saying what happens then: suffice it to say, it is cleverly spun out, attended by false alarms and dry runs (‘a majestic police constable ...”

“... millennia. The idea that St Peter was crucified upside down was no sooner taken as a sign of his self-proclaimed unworthiness to share the fate of Jesus, than it was reinterpreted as a mark of his common sense. Even a poor fisherman knew that hanging head down brought the oblivion of unconsciousness much more quickly than the usual upright, and ...”

“... and post-minimalist sculptors of her own generation or slightly older – figures such as Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra – and then with the promotion, through the journal October, which she co-founded in 1976, of a somewhat younger group of postmodern artists who substituted photographic imagery for painting, among them James ...”

“... it was not Proust’s life I wanted to discover. I was passionately eager to know not when he met Robert de Montesquiou [one of the chief models for the Baron de Charlus], but when he met Swann, Charlus or Albertine.’ This perspective accounts for an apparent slip in his other book, where de Fallois writes of ‘three decisive events’ in Proust’s ...”

“... poets especially have been very keen on remembering what they haven’t done. I’m thinking of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ and the unrealised walk in the first part of T.S. Eliot’s first Quartet.Frost says ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood’, and recounts his regret that he ‘could not travel both/And be one traveller’. He looked ...”

“... goal my whole life: to become an Icelandic writer.’The reader is made aware of opinionatedness, self-confidence, indomitability, mercuriality, application, aggression. Qualities not attractive in themselves, and often put to the service of poorer ends. Guðmundsson frequently mentions Laxness’s charm. He asked a lot of his mother, his wives and his ...”

“... before the king like a ‘piece of sexual bait’, and James bit. The current favourite, Sir Robert Carr, a flaxen-haired Scot, prevented Buckingham from being immediately parachuted into intimacy as a gentleman of the bedchamber. Instead, Buckingham became one of James’s cupbearers. He stood at James’s elbow, kept his glass topped up with wine and ...”

“... Gunn to the National Library of Scotland in 1971. But the letters seem unencumbered by writerly self-consciousness. Gunn and Shepherd didn’t meet often – Andrews notes that ‘their friendship exists mostly in their letters’ – but over more than forty years they developed a rare kind of ease. Shepherd addresses him as ‘Neil me lad’. He tells her ...”

“... not discern [them] from Inglish men’. Exile, voluntary or otherwise, provided opportunities for self-reinvention. Leonard Ragapo, who came to England with Raleigh, became a society celebrity and generous host, ‘not after the ordinarie rude manner of the Indians’, according to the adventurer Robert Harcourt, ‘but in ...”

“... eat and drink: all were determined by your fluid temperament. Dietetic knowledge was a matter of self-diagnosis, informed by your own appetites and routines. The governing rationale was analogy, a kind of thinking that made everyone both physician and poet. A popular manual declared that ‘Every sort of Food hath its operation in the Body, and on the ...”