“... came the famous camel-hair coat, won from a friend during a ferocious game of Monopoly, and worn, winter and summer, like an amulet. It is not clear where or when the dark glasses which completed the new look were acquired. The hint of menace which these, together with the cane, conveyed, was surely intentional: an eager follower of any story containing a ...”

“... and scandal, Maintenant was entirely written and published by Cravan: the other contributors (Robert Miradique, W. Cooper, E. Lajeunesse, Marie Lowitska etc) are all pseudonyms. Even the advertisements bear his skewed imprint: the restaurant Chez Jourdain entices customers with the words, ‘Where can you see Van Dongen’ – the Flemish painter Kees van ...”

“... to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge ...”

“... In later life​, the worst thing you could call Robert Frost was ‘literary’. ‘If I’m somewhat academic (I’m more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better,’ he wrote to Wallace Stevens teasingly in 1935. ‘It is so we are saved from being literary … Our poetry comes choppy, in well-separated poems, well interrupted by time, sleep and events ...”

“... her father’s death in 1930. The Big House had been from the outset a troubled birthright. In the winter of 1906, when Elizabeth was seven, Henry suffered the latest in a series of breakdowns and was certified at his own request. Elizabeth and her mother, Florence, went to live in England, on the Kent coast, where they found themselves less cast away than ...”

“... rather detachedly the behaviour and motives of his fellow-lodger’. These words were penned by Robert Latham’s collaborator, William Matthews, who died in 1976. He was a scholar in the old style, not given to trendy assimilation of historic sources into the narratology of modern angst. But his effort to see the diary as something more than ...”

“... US government took bioterrorism seriously enough to mount an elaborate exercise – Operation Dark Winter – to simulate a co-ordinated response to a smallpox attack, and the CDC says there is enough vaccine in the Strategic National Stockpile to vaccinate everyone in the US. Dark Winter took place in June 2001. When 9/11 ...”

“... things he wished he could do – ‘a dozen Chekhov-Shakespeare novels’, as one of his editors, Robert Phelps, summarised a characteristic resolution; a life of Jesus; a novel about the atom bomb – were to become an almost public constituent of his writing life. His criticism is marked by the same mixture of yearning and disappointed hopes. Agee’s ...”

“... her Catriona; would that be all right by me? I was very happy about it. We were both admirers of Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the contraceptive pill was widely ...”

“... House, survives. Burlington House was sold off to the government in the 1850s and modified by Robert Smirke, with what Pevsner called ‘high Victorian cruelty’, to house the Royal Academy. Charles Barry Jr and Robert Banks added the ranges that enclose the courtyard and house the Linnean, Geological and Astronomical ...”

“... And of course this is not nitpicking. When Amiens in As you like it strikes up ‘Blow blow, thou winter wind,/Thou art not so unkind/As man’s ingratitude’ our school-mistresses were doubtless right to tell us to pronounce ‘wind’ as ‘wynde’. But these are the opening, not the closing lines of Amiens’s little piece and (more important) the piece ...”

“... historian’s task, in the very subjects it studies, Venturi’s history could not be more unlike Robert Darnton’s new book. Venturi is interested in how great events were understood by great, or at least highly articulate, minds. Darnton is concerned with apparently insignificant events – not the American Revolution but a slaughter of cats – and in ...”

“... stock of available reality’. Such poetry invented the self as Keats invented his lovers in their winter castle, or Hopkins the wreck of the Deutschland, or Milton the loss of Paradise: it was indeed a comparable feat of inventive artifice. By contrast, Ashbery’s poetry, warmly admired by Bloom, perfectly illustrates Bloom’s own thesis that ‘the meaning ...”

“... In a letter to Robert Liddell dated 12 January 1940, Barbara Pym speaks well of her progress on a new novel, Crampton Hodnet, which she finished later that year, but which has only now surfaced for publication: ‘It is about North Oxford and has some bits as good as anything I ever did. Mr Latimer’s proposal to Miss Morrow, old Mrs Killigrew, Dr Fremantle, Master of Randolph College, Mr Cleveland’s elopement and its unfortunate end ...”

“... you open to specific sorts of ailment. There was speculation about dietary causes or dispositions. Robert Burton’s early 17th-century Anatomy of Melancholy, for instance, reckoned that a quartan ague might be brought on by eating too much pork.The category of intermittent fevers remained current in the 19th century, but one much discussed, much feared type ...”