“... reappears transformed. The nudes who cavort in the black water and dance in the deep-violet sky in Robert Huskisson’s Come unto These Yellow Sands are among the most exquisite and sensuous in British art, combining the vitality of Fuseli’s libidinous acrobats with the pearly translucence and sheen of William Etty’s bottom-heavy models. Mid-19th-century ...”

“... of Nations. But there was always a difficult undertow. Among de Valera’s greatest supporters was Robert Briscoe, a Jew who later became Lord Mayor of Dublin (as did his son Ben Briscoe), but he was never a minister in any Fianna Fáil government because of what Keogh calls ‘an undercurrent of hostility towards Jews in the country which even de Valera ...”

“... Homesick Blues’. Even the leading music journals – New Musical Express in Britain, and Rolling Stone in the USA – have found it hard to adjust to the new era; like the rock industry itself, rock critics are primarily interested in stars or guitars. A song combining computer-generated sounds and 37 shouts of ‘go’ isn’t, I suspect, what turns on ...”

“... reflection.As if the cairnstone could defy the cairn.As if the eddy could reform the pool.As if a stone swirled under a cascade,Eroded and eroding in its bed,Could grind itself down to a different core.Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never failFor they keep dancing till they sight the deer.The ‘Station Island’ sequence forms the middle section of ...”

“... relation between reason and unreason in this area. A recent and distinguished contribution is Robert Parker’s essay on pollution and purification, Miasma. One main feature of this research has been its invocation of comparative anthropology and sociology: not only ancient texts and remains but also the findings of modern fieldworkers have been adduced ...”

“... shapeless hulk, something like an exhumed crypt, as if the builder had sought to objectivise in stone and cement the disorder of his own delirious mind.’ Here we detect the melodramatic imagination at work, giving rise at every turn of phrase to what Vargas Llosa’s study of Madame Bovary calls ‘a certain distortion or exacerbation of ...”

“... can, it seems, make excellent translations on any principle at all, free or literal or in between. Robert Lowell was cruelly and unjustly pilloried by Nabokov for his wonderful ‘imitations’ of Rimbaud, Rilke and others. But then Nabokov’s literal version of Eugene Onegin has all kinds of virtues, and is itself routinely pilloried by almost everyone who ...”

“... 1982, Terry McCluskie and his friend Raymond Reynolds picked a fight with a total stranger, Robert Ford, and stabbed him to death. Ford was 15 years old and had just taken his girl-friend home after spending an evening at a local Citizens’ Band radio club. McCluskie, also 15, and Reynolds, 14, had spent the evening drinking and were on their way to a ...”

“... satire and after. He asks me if we ever had any alternative titles to Beyond the Fringe, which was Robert Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ...”

“... contributing in a loud, shrill voice remarks like ‘Mr Henry was a heavy man – nearly 16 stone – it was a job for him to push his bicycle uphill’ – in the middle of all the other conversation wh: he couldn’t hear. Her humour was in that tradition in which her father and her uncle Ronald excelled, and which Punch, at its best, epitomised. In ...”

“... made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ... It is poetry because it is better than prose.’ A New Path to the Waterfall is poetry because it is better than prose. Another ...”

“... or somebody – some murderer – like that. He had probably misread a communication from Robert (The Great Terror) Conquest. Anyway, it is already pretty clear that one of the chief excitements of this publication will be in finding out who has been dumped on, and how badly. Few well-known names escape the Larkin lash and although Anthony Thwaite ...”

“... a man called Warner who lived in Normandy wrote a very dirty Latin poem. Addressed to Archbishop Robert of Rouen, it relates the adventures of an Irish grammarian called Moriuht, who has a series of graphic and often disturbing sexual encounters while searching for his wife, who has been kidnapped. He is captured by Vikings, chained, flogged, urinated ...”

“... retrospectively read it as evidence of their election. For others, it may have been a stepping stone to deeper disillusionment with all forms of organised religion.Hunter insists that godly doubt must be distinguished from bold and unabashed atheism of the kind espoused by Derpier and Vavasour. He critiques the instinct to conflate them in some recent ...”

“... and unproblematic, even something of an anticlimax’. Elizabeth’s principal secretary, Robert Cecil, had without her knowledge masterminded a succession plan, starting a clandestine correspondence with James two years before her death. Accordingly, James had been shown the proclamation announcing his accession that was read aloud at Richmond Palace ...”