“... present lexicographer, so it can acquire new writers, compilers, continuers.’ In a US review, Robert Coover suggested that computer hackers might make Dictionary of the Khazars their own as a prototype hypertext, unpaginated, non-sequential, that can be entered anywhere by anybody. This looks forward to a utopian, high-tech version of the oral tradition ...”

“... fighting. In prison he reads Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Mao. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and the war in Vietnam come as news from outside. He writes of his own frustrations, of Garvey, Paul Robeson and Toussaint. The letters have been through the censor; and many things must therefore be addressed obliquely. As the months pass, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or dangerous. And always it made its mark, left some inexplicable compulsion behind. As Robert Wohl points out in his conclusion to The Lost Voices, Hitler was a veteran of the trenches, and he found his own way of exorcising and transforming the experience. ‘A war has no end for those who fought it,’ said Curzio Malaparte, who grew up admiring ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and intermingled. Wiltshire rightly devotes close attention to the poem ‘On the Death of Dr Robert Levet’ (in Johnson’s posthumously published Works ‘Dr’ was downgraded to ‘Mr’), first printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1783. In the lines ‘Nor, lettere’d arrogance, deny/Thy praise to merit unrefin’d’ it is hard not to see an ...”

“... Raban attempts to probe beneath the rhetoric to the actual experience of these emigrants. Robert Louis Stevenson’s caustic characterisations of his fellow passengers in his marvellous The Amateur Emigrant are delightedly and extensively quoted as evidence of the real motivations behind the movement westwards: ‘We were a company of the ...”

“... He’s the one great epic novelist of the revolution to come that never came.’ ‘All of a sudden, after the war, his novels seemed to me to have no literary value whatsoever,’ ‘I find them naff.’ ‘In L’Espoir he is immersed in the action and that makes his art great,’ ‘He was a fake: he always pretended to be what he was not.’ ‘He was in love with danger, with adventure,’ ‘He was one of the most religious men I ever met ...”

“... explicitly excluded. William Byrd becomes indistinguishable, not only from Gustav Holst, but from Robert Browning and John Martin. The serpentine line of Hogarth, the bounding line of Blake – each disappears into the other; the line of music and the line of art merely repeat each other, so that Hogarth, who was entirely sceptical of accounts of visual ...”

“... Paglia’s handling of the questions from the audience is good-natured and clever (‘As a fan of Robert Mapplethorpe I can’t object to being abused in public!’). To MIT students fresh from a day of classes in aeronautical engineering and computer science, it must have been a heady experience.The confident and witty persona of the MIT lecture, however, is ...”