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“... such remediless commonplace. We will really say no more on a topic so sterile.’ Not so, responds Robert Richardson; we will say 670 pages more on the topic. By the end you might wonder whether Emerson wasn’t rather in the right of it. An unremarkable, rather spartan, childhood; average performances at school and university; an appointment to, followed by a ...”

“... with some of the older children. In Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, Robert Gottlieb quotes the letter in which Dickens explains to his wife what happened: ‘Presently, we heard them come back and say to each other with some alarm: “Why, the gate’s shut, and they are all gone!” Ally began in a dismayed way to cry out, but ...”

“... of the American poet C.K. Williams, or having cartoonish fun with speech, a habit learned from Frank O’Hara (‘I think on the whole I would rather read/ Frank O’Hara than Geoffrey Chaucer,’ writes Geoff Hattersley). And it is true that a fighting politics seethes in poets like Sean O’Brien and Simon ...”

“... new book has just turned out to be entirely plagiarised from translations of American poets called Robert – Creeley, Mezey, Bly, Lowell, Penn Warren etc. The perpetrator had sent a copy of the book to one of the translators whose work he had stolen, eliciting the response: ‘Purely original’. Then the translator reads the book and finds his own ...”

“... guides, danger and discomfort are paramount. Borneo, written by the imprint’s publisher, Robert Pelton Young, describes itself as one of ‘a series of guides on remote regions for adventurers by adventurers’ and begins with a taste of what may lie in store for the user: I am squatting in a small clearing at night in the Borneo jungle … Sounds of ...”

“... pulled the piece in the second edition and admonished the journalist. Even Brady is persuaded that Robert Wise’s defensive protestations about the editing of The Magnificent Ambersons amount to a proven charge of obscurity and indecisiveness on Welles’s part. But the memo from Welles to Wise that he quotes from as evidence is perfectly ...”

“... hold their brothers cheap.’ An accomplished sonneteer, Cullen was a devotee of Keats, but as Robert Hillyer, who taught him during his brief stay at Harvard, made clear, Cullen experimented with a range of forms and published the results in Copper Sun. In his book In Pursuit of Poetry Hillyer wrote: ‘There they all are, ballad stanzas, heroic ...”

“... of the United States of America’ – does he repeat himself? Very well, he repeats himself.As Frank Kermode once said, literary canons ‘negate the distinction between knowledge and opinion’. They make beliefs about what we should know into what we do actually know. That is why they are both necessary and dangerous. They are necessary because you ...”

“... so intensely expressive at times and so terrifyingly deadened at others. When the film came out, Frank Kermode wrote in the LRB (6 January 2005) that ‘to give Pacino his due, he plays [Shylock] as a human being, increasingly vicious as his wrongs accumulate, totally lacking the sentiment of mercy, but always true to his culture and its eloquent ...”

“... this association. The Enemies of a Bishop (1929), published here for the first time, ends with Robert Bicknell shooting his Spectre, a crime the village policeman greets with typical equanimity: Policeman: Ee’s dead. ’Oo is ’e? Robert: My spectre. I had one. Policeman: That’s unusual. I’ope you’re coming ...”

“... feeling of satisfaction. The first is Gallery Nine at Burlington House, a square room where superb Frank Steallas of his black period confront us from the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in silence, is Robert Morris’s big low cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by ...”

“... Marooned in the ‘painful but glorious days’ of his past, he rather resembles the characters of Robert Olen Butler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: all of these concern South Vietnamese immigrants who have settled, for the most part happily, in Louisiana, yet who hark constantly back to their ...”

“... leather industry provided a livelihood, not only for Marlowe’s family, but also for that of Robert Greene and William Shakespeare, sons respectively of a Norwich saddler and a Stratford glover. Even here in Canterbury there were other young writers growing up: John Lyly, son of Peter Lyly, clerk to the consistorial court; and Stephen Gosson, a ...”

“... The commune that never took shape is now embalmed in a few poems and the Platonic heat of a frank correspondence; but the friends worked steadily in Bristol in 1795, from an energy of reverence in anticipation of the exemplary life they would share. ‘Our names are written in the book of destiny on the same page,’ said Southey. Less profane, but as ...”

“... Arthur Gorges adapting Lucan’s verse history of Rome’s civil wars, and Jonson’s friend Sir Robert Cotton rewriting the reign of Henry III, with an eye to Jacobean political anxieties. Cotton was among the most learned historians of his time. Yet his account of Henry’s reign abandons factual accuracy. Behind it there lies instead the old literary ...”