“... oeuvre real harm, not so much by causing readers to think less of his character (as readers may have been led to think less of Robert Frost), but simply by deflecting the focus of people’s attention. Rereading Cheever, it’s hard now not to be on the qui vive for signs of how his complicated, compulsively deceiving ...”

“... is that her donning of an ethnic identity in multicultural Australia was not innocent. It may be funny when we learn that this Anglo-Saxon girl forced her publisher to dance a Ukrainian folk dance with her after she won the Miles Franklin Award: it is not funny that someone taking a Ukrainian identity should use it to claim that most of her family had ...”

“... of West’s long-dead 19th-century fiancée. (So that’s all right then.) Much may have changed in these 113 years, but Dr Leete’s formal suit is still much the same (correct). The ladies still withdraw after dinner (off-target). Leete still offers his guest a courteous cigar – ‘Do you smoke?’ – while beginning his explanations ...”

“... when the hapless consort’s hairline started to recede or his ardour flag. This is the version Robert Graves gives in his Greek Myths, and though Graves’s anthropology is just as shaky as J.G. Frazer’s, I love the poetic truth at the kernel of it. Certainly the question ‘Who is your father?’ only becomes pressing when property is inherited through ...”

“... of particular interest to anyone curious about the first British settlement of Australia, for as Robert Hughes and others have so forcefully reminded us, the closing-off of the North American market for felons after 1776 compelled London officials to find other locations where convicts could be dumped. As James Matra explained in 1783, the British turned to ...”

“... the contemporary interest in ‘indeterminacy, fracture and defacement in Romantic literature’ may yet transform Beddoes’s ‘failings’ into privileged literary effects. But he has been critically exhumed and then reburied several times already, and there is no guarantee that this most recent attempt won’t join that doomed tradition. Beddoes’s ...”

“... no word for understatement. She won prizes but less international recognition than her warm friend Robert Lowell, who consistently celebrated her: Dear Elizabeth, Half New-Englander, half fugitive Nova Scotian, wholly Atlantic sea-board – Unable to settle anywhere, or live Our usual roaring sublime. Elizabeth Bishop certainly never roared. In this ...”

“... formidable rationalist who destroys the faith of the hapless clerical hero of Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere. At the age of 38, Pattison narrowly missed becoming Rector of Lincoln in an election which he has described in a manner that makes the late C.P. Snow’s account of a somewhat similar affair seem milk-and-water stuff. Pattison took refuge in ...”

“... became a cult classic of sorts, especially among fly-fishermen, before it gained general fame when Robert Redford released his film of it in 1992, two years after Maclean had died at the age of 87. At his death he had left an almost completed manuscript, Young Men and Fire, which the editors of the Chicago University Press prepared for ...”

“... I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses’) to cheer myself up. There may have been a touch of the Ahabs in Denis’s genealogy. Thomas Thatcher, grandfather of the present baronet, was a bit of an adventurer, sailing to New Zealand in the 1870s to seek his fortune rather than following his father and grandfather into farming near ...”

“... is not the Communist candidate, but the nominee of the National Patriotic Bloc of parties. That may be true; but the Communist Party, after its breakthrough victories in the Duma elections in December, was hugely more influential than any of the others. The second most powerful party was Working Russia, led by Victor Anpilov, another ranting anti-semitic ...”

“... in self-actualisation; and to Paris himself, who concludes his book with a Horneyan account of Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons. The result unwittingly reveals the limits of the ‘internal dialogue’ Paris so applauds in Horney. Psychoanalysis might have begun with Freud’s self-analysis at the time of his father’s death. But he also used ...”

“... first part). And his medical training, the importance of which he emphasises in the Reflections, may explain why he writes so well about the body, gestures and facial expressions. It is a pity he never wrote about Lavater and physiognomy. These virtues are combined with high theoretical ambition. Like many writers of the Frankfurt School, Elias played Marx ...”

“... Josef Frolik, a Czechoslovak defector, who said Owen was on a £500 monthly retainer organised by Robert Husak, another intelligence officer at the Czechoslovak embassy in London. Owen, Frolik said, had been passing secrets to the Czechoslovaks since 1954. During his trial at the Old Bailey, Owen acknowledged receiving money but denied that he had given away ...”

“... examination and its associated intelligence tests, with their visual and numerical puzzles, may have suggested that quite clever but not very was a truer estimation – though here again it’s consoling to read Todd, who describes IQ tests as an ‘entirely arbitrary means’ of filtering large groups of applicants, one so crude that every government ...”