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“... are never curst but when they are hungry.’Shakespeare took his play from a novella by Robert Greene called Pandosto: or, The Triumph of Time. That subtitle may have been one of the things which mainly interested the dramatist in it, the other being the incestuous plot situation that drives its royal hero to his final suicide: when his lost child ...”

“... being unbalanced or demented. The pain felt by Perkins in Psycho or Stewart in Vertigo is savage, yet it is more limited than that in Renoir, Mizoguchi or Welles because of Hitchcock’s resort to mania and melodrama. Hitchcock’s most profound subject and achievement is the juxtaposition of sanity and insanity, of bourgeois ordinariness and ...”

“... in Michael Collins. None matters much to me nor, it seems, have any mattered to the Irish public. Robert Kee put it well when he wrote that the film’s intentions were honest and its central themes ‘historically wholly acceptable’. Not for the first time, however, Kee is in a minority position. The film’s historical compression has been transformed by ...”

“... and Tito turned almost wholly to Tito’s advantage. Stalin’s blockade of Yugoslavia was as savage as the blockade of Berlin, and just as ineffective. The multiple assassination attempts on Tito failed. Yugoslavia did not become isolated. Indeed, Tito expanded Yugoslavia’s global reach; he became one of the founders of the non-aligned movement and ...”

“... He became the bosom companion (and, later, biographer) of the squalid and glamorous poet Richard Savage. At night, ‘in high spirits and brimful of patriotism’, they walked the streets together, denouncing ministerial corruption and vowing to stand by their country. Savage’s licentiousness, Boswell reported, may have ...”

“... la Mare, although his illustrious admirers have ranged from Virginia Woolf to Derek Walcott, from Robert Frost to W.H. Auden, from Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or phrases ...”

“... and French, American and Native American: the histories are interdependent. Consider Britain’s savage war against ‘tribal’ insurgents in Iraq and its foundational role in creating that country, and how obscured that relationship is in present discussions about the impending war. Elazar Barkan’s The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating ...”

“... has entered literary mythology – but without lasting success. As Johnson was to say of Richard Savage, another denizen of Grub Street, ‘he was therefore obliged to seek some other means of support; and, having no profession, became by necessity an author.’ The accession of the Roman Catholic James II in 1685, and his deposition in 1688 by his nephew ...”

“... I fear only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had been merely a friendly discussion. All this was the background to the Crimean War of 1853-55, the subject of Orlando Figes’s admirable book. The war was at once the most dramatic ...”

“... not straight ethnography, however: Segalen had a case to make, the same case that Gauguin and Robert Louis Stevenson had made before him, against the degradation of native life which had set in, first with the coming of Christian missionaries to the islands early in the 19th century, and then with the onset of a colonial administration. The Maoris had ...”

“... nights, criminal operations and complicated political double-dealing. The collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach pointed out in 1943 that it was an ideal setting for detective stories, and Patrick Marnham’s gripping book is a detective story of sorts. It recounts the life of a man who was, in himself, particularly opaque. Jean Moulin was ambitious and ...”

“... Sontag cited were so powerfully composed that they attained iconic status almost instantly: Robert Capa’s photograph from 1936 of a Spanish Republican fighter, arms flung out as a bullet hits him (that the photo may have been staged doesn’t alter its influence); or the image, taken in Vietnam in 1972 by the AP photographer Nick Ut, of terrified ...”

“... background, and although Herbert Howarth wrote well about it in Some Figures behind T.S. Eliot, Robert Crawford has made a substantial addition. His patient Oxford D.Phil. thesis is intended more generally to illustrate Eliot’s preoccupation with the primitive and the city, but its opening chapters are about St Louis and the Mississippi. He illustrates ...”

“... Island. William Styron is almost as monstrous as Hellman herself: self-centred, nervy, and savage with contempt for anyone who gets in his way. When he accidentally burns the fancy pan-fried quail he is preparing for Hellman and her friends in Hellman’s kitchen one night, he blames the resulting mess on Mahoney and her fellow cook, who have been ...”

“... and that ‘the crazed parataxis still flashes the voltage of the street.’ We are told that Robert Southey’s ‘over-long nose’ gave his face a ‘workmanlike quality, and his work ethic is what he is largely remembered for’. And this, of a representation of melancholy: ‘He wears only linens over his loins. If they are soiled, we don’t ...”