“... in which, notably Iraq, he is of course deeply complicit. And while we all know he’s clever, he may also feel the need to demonstrate that he’s likeable, or at least that he’s a member of the human race. Alas for the result. Along with every other justified accusation, the most depressing thing of all about New Labour has been its sheer platitudinous ...”

“... you can’t really read an Ellis book without thinking about his whole career. If you don’t, you may end up dumping him into one of the convenient pigeonholes (brat, druggie, pervert, creep, minimalist) that have already been created for him. Ellis has the gift, or perhaps the curse, or perhaps the tactic, of being able to hide in plain sight: his novels ...”

“... the investigation last? When can I leave for Kazakhstan? I explain to Ivan that the investigation may be complex and that we will need to follow all the relevant protocols. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ He stares down at his phone, scrolling for emails and messages. Sergei’s PA has booked me into a hotel that has only recently opened. She tells me it will be good ...”

“... her own exertions, Mary Ward made herself one of the most famous and highly paid women of her day. Robert Elsmere was a publishing prodigy (Sutherland has called it ‘probably the most popular novel of the century’), and it was followed by books that earned an apparently interminable flow of adulation and royalties. She used her literary status to make ...”

“... Thomas Hardy once told Robert Graves how he had gone to the Oxford English Dictionary to confirm the existence of a dialect word he proposed to use in a poem, and came to a standstill because the only authority quoted for it was his own Under the Greenwood Tree. This is an acute case of our dependence on dictionaries, and illustrates the commonest reason for resorting to them ...”

“... writers is more remarkable than what happens to the rest of mankind, merely that through them we may see ordinary events more vividly because we have glimpses of how they appeared to minds exceptionally lucid or devious, and can measure how little separates such minds from our own, when it comes to the ordinary business of living. The historical periods of ...”

“... of. I do not believe that any among those of us who have written on Surrealism in general and on Robert Desnos in particular, admiring though we are of this poet who was the first to perform automatic sleep speaking (and always outperformed anyone and everyone at it) has wanted to make Conley’s claim, or indeed anything like it. So, were there nothing else ...”

“... in glory, a being in human form but quasi-divine, not quite contiguous with the adult world. As Robert Rosenblum observes in his stimulating and characteristically original essay, The Romantic Child, Hodler’s celebration – like Gotch’s – lacks some of the raw and peculiar passion of the early Romantics. The children are still represented as ...”

“... is with the working life of shoelaces and the rival hypotheses (there are two contenders) which may be adduced to explain not only how they come to break but also how one shoelace will snap within days of the other. This is the argumentative mainstream, into which, however, flow frequent tributaries in the form of disquisitions on ...”

“... Sprinklings of pseudo-Hebrew here and there added to the mystique. When the former army chaplain Robert Bacon visited the ‘Shakers’ God’, John Robins, in London in around 1650, he found Robins sitting on a bed before his disciples speaking in tongues: ‘But the words he spake I did not understand, only they seemed to me to be a mixture of Latin, and ...”

“... 11, leaving the family $8 after funeral expenses had been paid. Frost’s mother, Isabelle, took Robert and his sister east from San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they lived initially with her parents-in-law before Isabelle tried – with mixed results – to hold down a job as a teacher. Frost was many things before he was a poet; by the time ...”

“... If Robert Lowell had not been a Lowell would he ever have had the confidence to write the poems he did? It is impossible to imagine the scion of a distinguished English family using that family now as a basis for poetic composition. But all Lowell’s poems are about being a Lowell, or rather, more specifically, about being this Lowell ...”

“... wise, urbane, deeply reflective, spaciously well-informed and independent in judgment. It may be that his independence of judgment is sometimes carried too far: I thought it strange to read an entry headed ‘Anomie’ that made no mention of Emile Durkheim or of Robert Merton. ‘Anomy’ is declared obs. by the ...”

“... informal networks and shared expectations, a regime was only ever a few steps away from disaster. Robert Cecil knew only too well how much work was required to keep the country stable. He had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was for forty years the bedrock of Elizabeth I’s government, and learned his complicated ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”