“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Moynihan Report was refuted, then it is not true; if only vehemently protested against, then it may be true, or not. Another way of looking at the problem is to see it as a confusion of discourses. The very language of the debate – ‘migration’, ‘ethnic’, ‘ghetto’, and, most strikingly, Lemann’s title, The Promised Land – is borrowed from ...”

“... Moreover, the letters which appear in the book are almost exclusively David’s to Debbie. This may imply that Mrs Owen vetoed the publication of her compositions, thus demonstrating a seemly New England reticence which is alien to the Celtic Doctor. A more likely explanation, I fear, is that Debbie kept David’s while David chucked Debbie’s ...”

“... ratio is obscenely favourable, even by pre-Robbins Oxbridge standards. Caltech still lives by Robert A. Millikan’s rule that you cannot expect good research from a professor who teaches more than four hours a week. When George Ellery Hale founded the institution in Pasadena, one of his motives was the high concentration of retired millionaires in the ...”

“... be the best Irish poet since Yeats, which arose from rather casual remarks by the power-crazed Robert Lowell and the craze-powered Clive James, who seemed to have forgotten both MacNeice and Kavanagh. In the meantime, Heaney is a very good poet indeed – which is enough to be going on with.Heaney’s version of the Middle Irish Romance Buile Suibhne ...”

“... have had to settle for a grandmother who did or didn’t try to suffocate her; a foster-father who may have raped her; 12, 13 or 15 abortions; perhaps a long-lost son. Even after her death, which now seems to have become more interesting than her life, the claims of Robert Kennedy, the Communist Party and the Mafia are ...”

“... had already happened, however ingenious and surprising, appealed to an inferior sort of curiosity. Robert Louis Stevenson saw detective fiction as ‘enthralling but insignificant, like a game of chess, not a work of human art’. Conan Doyle agreed. Detective fiction belonged to ‘a lower stratum of literary achievement’. That’s why he pleaded ...”

“... his stares and his silences: a skill he had honed in college, modelling himself on his classmate Robert Friedland, who transferred to Reed from Bowdoin in Maine after being caught with 24,000 tabs of LSD and sentenced to two years in prison. For a few years Jobs, who was already meditating and taking hallucinogens, ‘treated him almost like a ...”

“... is not a Bolshevist, an Atheist, or a Communist, is not a Prohibitionist, in spite of what anyone may say, her husband was not a conscientious objector, and her children are not neglected.’ She was disappointed that the first woman to take a seat in the Commons was the Conservative Nancy Astor, whom she did not consider ‘a good specimen for the first ...”

“... enthusiasm for Ossian saw the publication of the important Homeric studies of Thomas Blackwell and Robert Wood. In the late 18th century there was a revival of serious education in the ancient universities, and the institution of the Tripos at Cambridge and the Honour Schools at Oxford had the effect of increasing substantially the numbers of those able to ...”

“... in a growing body of writing as a sanctuary. ‘Healthy’ homes made for healthy children, Robert Edis argued in Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses (1881). Thomas Horsfall, a philanthropist and heir to a textiles fortune, agreed. Children form ‘habits of thought and feeling’, he wrote in an essay on ‘The Use of Pictures and Other Works of ...”

“... earliest work did not necessarily have these qualities. His 1882 painting of a flamenco dancer may have reminded admiring critics of Goya, but his 1884 portrait of ‘Madame X’, the American-born adventuress Virginie Gautreau, shocked Paris with its louche portrayal of the wife of a wealthy French banker, her naked shoulders and décolleté rendered ...”

“... strong influence at this crisis: she imagined him in the dock, defying the authorities rather like Robert Emmet, and she said she would never speak to him again if he fled the country. She was a famous patriotic poet (she published under the name ‘Speranza’) and was closely associated with the Fenian Movement. In 1882, Wilde told a lecture audience in San ...”

“... But division is well recorded in Scots from the early 15th century on. It is possible that Lorimer may have thought of his translation as a step towards establishing what linguists call a grapholect, a national written language which is used, as English is, by speakers of a number of different dialects, though no one speaker will draw on all of its lexical ...”