“... would occupy too great an emotional space in my life and leave no room for other things which may also have been destined for me. These are the thoughts of a man who is in exile from a civilisation that no longer exists, and will be condemned, eventually, to extinction. Because of his preoccupation with memory and his fondness for long sentences, Gazdanov ...”

“... its music? The musicologist and advocate of the Scots language Billy Kay feels passionately about Robert Fergusson, the wild-child poet who died in the Edinburgh bedlam at 24. In Stromness, Montrose, Lochgelly, Stirling, he recited Fergusson’s verses. And then Karine Polwart sang the song that the dying Fergusson loved more than any other: ‘The Birks of ...”

“... of our religion and the shame of our country.’ England’s political and commercial elite may have been able to stomach trade with the ‘Turk’, but there is no getting around the deep-rooted (if ill-informed) antipathy shared by large swathes of the population. Their attitude is reflected by Portia’s response in The Merchant of Venice, when the ...”

“... is dismayed to notice, when his thoughts turn to ending it all – in the style of Hart Crane or Robert Maxwell – that, wherever he jumps from, he will probably only find more superyacht beneath him. A woman’s hair may be ‘a sort of aureate beige’ or ‘dyed a maximal black’. Pleasures are technical, liquid and ...”

“... company he wanted to join (the straight-acting insiders of the new moment, like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and Frank O’Hara). A successful commercial artist, homosexual, Catholic, working-class – the grounds for exclusion, or self-exclusion, were multiple. Warhol’s parents were Ruthenians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father came to ...”

“... Jannet Thompson et al. On a blank page a note records that the book was given to James Stanger by Robert Fisher in 1662, ‘in steade of one that he had of mine when he went away from Thorntwhait’. Typically, it seems that The Soules Exaltation remained in the same village for centuries: books were mobile, passing from hand to hand, but they rarely ...”

“... between religion and fly fishing.’ Tom Fort’s Casting Shadows: Fish and Fishing in Britain may not qualify as ‘literature’; but it offers garrulous witness to a fine passion. Fort, who is a former fishing columnist at the Financial Times and the author of, among others, The Book of Eels, Against the Flow and The Far from Compleat Angler is a sort ...”

“... speculates that ‘her good relations with the USSR did not escape notice,’ and thinks that she may have been ‘gotten rid of’ as a security risk because of her good relations at the same time with John and Robert Kennedy. He has dinner at Nelson Rockefeller’s New York apartment, but assures his Soviet readers that ...”

“... to many aspiring Ruskin scholars, is British, but his teaching has not been in a university. Robert Hewison, one of the driving forces behind the revival that dates from the foundation of the Ruskin Association in 1969, has always steered clear of an academic career. So has Tim Hilton, whose biography of Ruskin’s early years (published in 1985) offers ...”

“... should say that I have been a member of Fortnight’s advisory board for five years.) Robert Johnstone, who edited the anthology’s ‘Cultural World’ section of Troubled Times, describes Fortnight as originating in ‘dark days when publishing or anything mildly progressive culturally was a novelty in strife-stricken, bomb-blasted, war-weary ...”

“... 1949 and 1952 with Syria, Jordan and Egypt respectively. The title of the book, like the poem by Robert Frost which inspired it, is rather ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so. Rabinovich declines to identify those who decided not to take the road towards peace. He may be intrigued by Frost’s suggestion that the choice ...”

“... of ‘place’ in expatriate writing. Did you know, for example, that what Americans take to be Robert Frost’s most characteristic evocations of his native scene – ‘Birches’, ‘Mending Wall’ and ‘After Apple Picking’ – were written in Old England, not New? Or that Stephen Crane’s ‘The bride comes to Yellow Sky’ and ‘The Blue ...”

“... but also because everything Disraeli said or did is subject to qualification by something else he may have done or said at some other time. Consider, for instance, the idea of Disraeli as a kind of Zionist-before-Zionism. Surely, one thinks, his novel Alroy, which is about a medieval Jewish leader who wishes to redeem the Jews from captivity and bring them ...”

“... Robert Frost’s crack about free verse – that it’s tennis without a net – might be modified to describe Georges Perec’s novels: they’re tennis with nets everywhere. His whodunnit La Disparition (1969), a lipogram, was written without the use of the letter e (it was translated into e-less English as A Void by Gilbert Adair in 1994 ...”

“... but some of the most remarkable and evocative have only come to light recently, and there may be more to be discovered. Taylor is not compiling an anthology, but he listens carefully to the seamen’s voices and brings out their personalities by paraphrase more than direct quotation. Deep-sea sailors were not, as is sometimes suggested, the wretched ...”