“... like Blake or Ginsberg, a poet for the wild Sixties. A provocative spin was given to the debate by Robert Bernard Martin in his Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (1980). Martin traced the Tennysonian gloom back to the fear of stigmatising illness. Young Alfred’s formative years, according to this biography, were haunted by ‘the dark counterpoint of ...”

“... bigger and more significant revolution than punk: this is a wholesale reappraisal of pop music. As Robert Ray writes, in his illuminating essay in Present Tense: ‘Sampling and sequencing, go the current complaints, make musicians unnecessary ... we can detect here the historical complaint against every new technology and every avant-garde movement that ...”

“... reads his poems of the 1830s against more orthodox Tory productions by John Wilson, John Keble and Robert Montgomery, as well as some ‘vapid’ lyrics (the adjective is Tennyson’s) from the popular album collections of the period. Familiar works like ‘The Palace of Art’ and ‘The Lotus Eaters’ (both 1832; revised 1842) appear alongside poems by ...”

“... worked with James Guthrie at the Peartree Press. She might have lived in Hampstead and gone to Robert Bevan’s Sundays, or tramped with Eleanor Farjeon to Edward Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called them, ‘as amorphous as friends can be’, they were nearly all highly literate, and ...”

“... continue to the year of Truffaut’s death. He has some regular correspondents and confidants – Robert Lachenay, his school friend, Helen Scott, who worked with him on the Hitchcock book, Annette Insdorf, who wrote a book about him – but also writes to friends at the Cahiers, to actors with whom he is working, to journalists requesting information, people ...”

“... simultaneously reinforces the notion that to be homosexual is abnormal. Seymour-Smith’s life of Robert Graves was respectful, sympathetic and engrossing; his book on Kipling is not so much a critical biography as a poor relation of Flaubert’s Parrot or Anthony Burgess’s highly speculative novel about Shakespeare, Nothing Like the ...”

“... a desperate situation to work his best, or indeed to work at all. Wordsworth made the comment that Robert Southey, Coleridge’s brother-in-law, ‘writes too much at his ease’, but the criticism could equally have applied to Wordsworth himself, not because Wordsworth found composition easy – it gave him the psychosomatic pains which only afflicted ...”

“... Some of the most interesting and best-researched work in this field, like the studies by Robert Nye and Susanna Barrows, is scrupulous to avoid both the reduction of crowds to mythology and the perpetuation of élitist generalisations about so-called mass society and its inevitable horror, mediocrity or vulgarity. It is a difficult position to ...”

“... not to do what the Panel said. I asked them whether in these circumstances Rupert Murdoch or Robert Maxwell or one of the other so-called ‘big hitters’ would pay any attention to the Panel whatever, and was told that they probably would not. But here I was up against Catch 22 with a vengeance. I am a member of the Securities and Investments ...”

“... like Anne Anderson and Honor Appleton get in, but not the more distinctive Gladys Peto; Robert Lawson is here but not Lawson Wood; A.E. Bestall (briefly) but not Thomas Henry. In compiling the book – which is, in fact, very nearly comprehensive – the authors have drawn on the holdings of the Victoria and Albert Museum, in particular the Guy ...”

“... them in cleaving to the convention of literary tourism exemplified by Dickens, Frances Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson and dozens of other British writers, for whom democratic, republican America presented an appalling and comic spectacle of unruly manners and institutions. For these, too, were out-and-back narratives: the place from which their authors ...”

“... Was there nobody more interesting? More talented? It’s as though Coleridge had stuck with Robert Southey and never met Wordsworth. Why should a writer such as Flaubert, always so fiercely self-assured in his literary judgments, submit to being guided and corrected by the lesser man? Part of the answer may lie in the fact that their friendship was ...”

“... De Gaulle (perceived as an honorary maroon) when the island was held by the Pétainiste Admiral Robert. De Gaulle pays a visit in 1964, a year which coincides, in the novel, with a prolonged assault on Texaco by riot police and assorted demolition crews. Marie-Sophie is among the ecstatic mob that stampedes to petition him as though he were a saint. Even ...”

“... a theme taken up from an earlier passage on Chatwin’s troubled and condescending essay about Robert Louis Stevenson in the TLS, which Susannah Clapp calls ‘a complicated piece of self-examination and self-dislike’. Identification was a dangerous area for Chatwin. It became disastrous when he thought he saw a tendency which, whether he had it or ...”

“... consider a more sophisticated version of the Robinson technique. Ian Hamilton, noted biographer of Robert Lowell, writes to J.D. Salinger and informs him that he has become Hamilton’s latest subject: would the notoriously reclusive novelist mind answering some questions, could he take a visit? Hamilton doesn’t expect an answer; nor does he want one, since ...”