“... are not local and temporary, but are universal, permanent, contagious and indiscriminate.It may seem odd that this kind of emotional and visceral experience can be prompted by a poetry more usually accused of being merely literary, cerebral, philosophical – but it can. Thornton’s description rings truest for passages like this: Dental roof in spasm ...”

“... Robert Fergusson died in Edinburgh’s Bedlam on 17 October 1774. He was 24 years old. He had been admitted to the asylum three months before, against his will, because his mother could no longer look after him. Having been persuaded by some friends that he was being taken out in a sedan chair to visit another acquaintance, he was conveyed instead to a cell in the asylum, a sepulchrous building abutting the old city wall ...”

“... Jungians is questionable. Chrétien’s earliest and most influential follower, Robert de Boron, would certainly not have done, having altogether more orthodox Christian ideas in mind. He took up Chrétien’s passing remark about the Mass wafer, and turned the Grail (now deserving a capital letter) into an object of religious ...”

“... Nazianzen’s ‘Soul and Body’, she has the rhetorician pray for the right words, ones that ‘may flourish/Of which mine enemy would spoil me,/Using pleasurehood to foil me!’ But the poem’s own fondness for verbal flourishes isn’t easily disentangled from pleasurehood. Her writing often uses pleasure as a foil; more often, though, it wants to be ...”

“... aside the genre known as ‘Imitation’, in which poets like Samuel Johnson, Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell have done such marvellous things. A verse translation may aim to be an independent modern work in its own right. Or, I ought rather to say, this is what some famous and admired translations have in fact been. If ...”

“... the marshlands between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the camp is now abandoned and looted, but in May 2005 it was a busy centre of military operations. Amara has seen many reversals of fortune and opinion: it was once a hideout for anti-Saddam insurgents, whom he punished by draining the marshes. He also killed many of them, and buried their bodies in mass ...”

“... from Ben Jonson to Martin Amis, normally disapprove of such sentences; but aposiopesis may be allowed as a structural feature, as when Yeats ends his ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ by claiming that he cannot continue his roll call of Gregory’s friends because ‘a thought/Of that late death took all my ...”

“... of arms to the Iranians from 1985 onwards, of the ludicrously misconceived mission to Tehran by Robert McFarlane in May 1986, and of the use to which the profits of the sales were put, have been the subject of inquiries by the combined Senate and House Select Committee. The major questions were whether the President knew ...”

“... life rather than art to art, or fiction to fiction. In two respects, unfortunately, Fatherland by Robert Harris makes artistic comparisons inescapable. It belongs, first, to that select genre of fiction which deals in the Alternative Present, or in this case an alternative recent past. It is set in 1964 in the vast, imperial, intimidating Berlin of an ...”

“... a history of the Economic Section up to 1961, and the other the first instalment of the diaries of Robert Hall, who was head of the Economic Section from 1947, throw a good deal of light on these questions. Both authors of the history worked in the Section, Alec Cairncross briefly in 1940-41, and again as its head after 1961, and Nita Watts from 1941 to ...”

“... When Robert Stone’s best-known novel, Dog Soldiers, was published in 1974, there was a small but significant overlap of material with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s souped-up, superheated journalistic account of the beginnings of the counterculture, published six years earlier. The coincidence of material was in many ways inevitable ...”

“... consideration came the reply: ‘the outstanding mediocrity in the Party’. Trotsky’s contempt may in part be explained by the wounds which his own pride had suffered from the growth of Stalin’s influence among the party rank and file after Lenin’s death in January 1924. On the other hand, not even Stalin’s closest allies considered intellect and ...”

“... Thwaite’s of Edmund Gosse and, of course, the two recent books on Gerard Manley Hopkins, one by Robert Martin and one by Norman White, but there has been nothing comprehensive. There is now. In Robert Bridges Catherine Phillips tells us everything we could reasonably wish to know about his life. About his poetry there is ...”

“... they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their preface to the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, ‘is intended to be didactic as well as representative.’ Though the things anthologies make happen ...”

“... flat and left a neat docket of pawn tickets on the mantelpiece. Readers of Blessings in Disguise may sometimes feel that the book is Hamlet without the Prince, but the publishers are at pains to point out that this is not ‘the exercise in egomania purveyed by so many actors and actresses’. It is on the whole a fascinating account of some of Guinness’s ...”