“... about the change from satiric to sentimental comedy. Arguing instead in terms which endorse Robert Hume’s thesis in his vastly superior book Henry Fielding and the London Theatre (Clarendon, 1988), Roberts suggests that market forces rather than moralising zeal led to a new conservatism. The collapse of the King’s Company in 1682 introduced a new ...”

“... Very good, Mr Hardy. Excellent poetry, especially in a time of the breaking of nations (1915). One of time’s universals. ‘War’s annals will cloud into night/Ere their story die.’ But what if you haven’t invented the harrow yet? Or indeed the collar for harnessing horses? The former is not seen till the Bayeux Tapestry; the date of the latter is much debated, but is definitely a Medieval, not an antique invention ...”

“... and has defined his political ideal in ‘a celebrated study of the Utopian Socialists from Robert Owen to William Morris’. Marquis is also, it emerges, a dirty-minded lecher who betrays his disciple Richard sexually and intellectually before being carried off raving to the lunatic asylum. He returns at the end of the novel to lead the fight against ...”

“... concedes that his continued abuse of reluctant ‘John’ shows that he did not love him), ‘Robert’ (who recognises the fraudulence of saying that ‘the boys aren’t really hurt’) and Matthew (who is ‘still very disgusted with people who want to have sex with children’) are all described by Dr Li as merely ‘ambivalent’ in ...”

“... made such an impact on me was that it wasn’t among the ten Montale poems that appeared in Robert Lowell’s 1961 book of translations, Imitations. I am saying, I suppose, that Lowell spoiled the ground in making it accessible. At this moment I would guess that Imitations is more influential than any other aspect of Lowell’s poetic practice: the idea ...”

“... Australian ex-servicemen is not contested, and it is reflected in Kangaroo. The Australian writer Robert Darroch maintains that Lawrence’s character Cooley, the Jewish leader known as Kangaroo, is based on General Rosenthal, who was very well liked by the returning Diggers. He was not a Jew, as Lawrence may have assumed; or he may have got that trait from ...”

“... rain as ‘grief in arrears’ is the loveliest thing in the book), or the compact subtleties of Robert Crawford, whose short poem ‘Scotland’ is infinitely more subtle and political than the work of Didsbury and McMillan or even Peter Reading. And then the sweet, rapid brocade of Glyn Maxwell’s complex forms, or the grace of Pauline Stainer. These ...”

“... Chenoune, is one who deplores the failure of his contemporaries to dress for the occasion. Was it Robert Morley who complained that the modern theatre audience had come to resemble a mob which, threatened by some imminent natural disaster, had hastily flung on the nearest garments to hand? It is plain rude to be ill-dressed in cities, says Sir Hardy. He ...”

“... Parini observes that ‘Like so many gifted writers – F. Scott Fitzgerald, W. H. Auden and Robert Frost among the most prominent of them – Steinbeck could not accommodate himself to the academic grid and grind.’ Were Parini to describe Steinbeck pissing, doubtless we should be told that Shakespeare and Milton were also in the habit of passing water ...”

“... Beg’ and ‘A Postcard from North Antrim’, Heaney sounds that ‘heartbreak’ note which Robert Lowell used to talk about. Maybe Lowell talked to him about it. Field Work has an elegy in memory of Lowell (‘the master elegist’), and the two poets saw each other often during the mid-Seventies. In this book, even the ‘love-poems’ (a genre Heaney ...”

“... 1885, the enlistment of 13-year-old foot-soldiers, General Sherman’s scorched earth policy, and Robert E. Lee crying in front of his men, are, if not exactly memories, vivid tales that she can tell at only one remove. Lucy became a Confederate widow as a result of her marriage to a man nearly forty years older than herself, ‘Captain’ Marsden (actually ...”

“... which can only end in disaster. On the right, commentators such as Lord Carver, Enoch Powell and Robert McNamara have argued that deterrence means that nuclear weapons would never be used even if war broke out. Thus the threat to unleash them is increasingly incredible. As Mr Powell put it, ‘the crucial question is whether there is any stage of a European ...”

“... would happen to them if they did not go to war. Where, though, did responsibility lie? Partly, Robert Evans explains, with Austro-Hungary – but only partly, because the war its leaders wanted under Serbian provocation was only a small localised conflict, a third Balkan war. The main responsibility lay with the German leaders, who alone wanted a major war ...”

“... humour. It amused as well as suited him to conceal his sexual nature, and he was delighted when Robert Graves once held forth to him about that of Wilfred Owen: ‘All that about “the poetry is in the pity” – really it’s as if you or I were looking at a battlefield covered with the bodies of beautiful girls.’ Plomer had a rich social ...”

“... The 13 remaining essays, whose authors include Stanley Fish, Louis Montrose, Stephen Orgel and Robert Weimann, concentrate on Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. A number of these essays are concerned with representation in a fairly strict sense of the term – representations of the self, of gender, of power, of England. Like Greenblatt, several ...”