“... interweaves deep historical insights with a strong composer’s inevitable prejudices – Robert Simpson’s impersonal challenge is spotlessly objective, sternly factual and, at the same time, unashamedly ethical. His scrupulous analysis of the Proms’ past yields a practical proposal as well as what already seems to have proved an indisputable ...”

“... In​ New York in the 1960s, your first sight of gay pornography may well have been in public, looking in a sex shop window. If you were a gay kid, but closeted you would have reacted with pleasure, certainly, maybe even bliss – what Roland Barthes called jouissance. But there would also have been an inexplicable, almost sickening lust, and the fear of being seen looking ...”

“... line of false assumptions that mesmerised Americans in Vietnam. ‘Psychologists or sociologists may explain some day,’ Henry Kissinger believes, ‘what it is about that distant monochromatic land, of green mountains and fields merging with an azure sea, that for millennia has acted as a magnet for foreigners who sought glory there and found ...”

“... was subsequently driven off the centre pages by Kristallnacht and the Jewish pogroms in Germany. Robert Kee’s book has its origins in his commemorative TV documentary and the book by Robert Shepherd, producer of Channel 4’s A Week in Politics, reads like the script of another documentary. ...”

“... two volumes, it had more in common with the style of the 18th century than the 20th century. We may in retrospect regard 1868 as the beginning of the period of adversary politics and the ‘swing of the pendulum’: a Conservative win in 1874, Liberals in 1880, a slight hiccup in 1885, but Conservatives back in 1886, Liberals in 1892, Conservatives in ...”

“... of stylistic precedence and traditional modes of expression are common to both. In the case of Robert Hughes, author of the monumental American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, the artist of choice would be John Singer Sargent, brilliant pictorial chronicler of the beau monde of the 19th century. Like Sargent, Hughes is a brilliant ...”

“... Thousand Million Man-Power (1937), the fifth novel Trevelyan published, is something else again. Robert Thomas, recently graduated from the School of Chemistry and Mathematics at London University, gets a job at Cupid Cosmetics Co. Limited, where they make up ‘great vats of face cream and powder’ from his formulas and pack them, with a lot of frilly ...”

“... criminality’. The word ‘sheer’ did most of the work: the cause of criminality, Theresa May was arguing, was criminality itself. Boris Johnson was quick to agree. When did it become a test of ideological purity to be able to say with a straight face that poverty and unemployment have nothing to do with the causes of crime? Who was the first ...”

“... Home,’ Mary suggests in Robert Frost’s 1914 poem ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.’ To which her husband, Warren, replies: ‘I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ Home is Marilynne Robinson’s third novel; published four years after Gilead and 27 years after her astonishing debut, Housekeeping, it explores with unsparing precision and the most delicate subtlety the implications of Frost’s rival definitions of the idea of home ...”

“... mine, he is ours, and therefore I must be, in that sense, a god in this; where he is concerned I may decide what is best. And I believe this has done me good. I remember him. Again.’ The encounters between Willie and his father are some of the most affecting scenes in the novel. But they also set the stage for the book’s central conundrum. Contemplating ...”

“... Anywhere but here lies in its presentation of Adele, the heroine’s mother. Every American woman may have her own story, but all children who read can use the myth of a mother both vital and wrong. As with her use of the movement to the West, one feels that Mona Simpson’s drawing of Adele, her giving her lines like ‘I’m part of all that went before and ...”

“... and Reznikoff, and of course the whole group of poets associated with Black Mountain College – Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. Of all these it was Charles Olson who engaged most directly and continuously with the implications of Pound’s poetics. The Maximus Poems can he read ...”

“... on the backside – and Eva and Maria did not make a sound.’ Or a wife is being punished, it may be: ‘As they descended the first flight of stairs, they heard a sharp sound that, as Mary said later, could as easily have been an object dropped as a face slapped.’ Such negations are alive, everywhere and diversely. ‘For reasons they could no longer ...”

“... to forget that Crick ever set it. Nowhere is it more difficult to observe than in the matter of Robert Burns. Long ago, Edwin Muir said that ‘for a Scotsman to see Burns simply as a poet is almost impossible.’ Robert Crawford, himself an admired and graceful poet, writes on the closing page of The Bard that ...”

“... For a spell during the 1960s, Robert Creeley’s ‘I Know a Man’ may have been the most often quoted, even the most widely known, short poem by a living American. Here is the poem: As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, – John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going ...”