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“... It was reading Robert Lowell that brought me to poetry at the age of 19, in 1976. I had borrowed a friend’s omnibus edition of Life Studies and For the Union Dead, and something in me said: ‘This is it!’ I don’t remember the poem I first had that response to, but most likely it was in Part IV of Life Studies, ‘Dunbarton’ or ‘For Sale’, or perhaps ‘Waking in the Blue ...”

“... expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell ...”

“... Froude’s Life of Carlyle and his edition of Carlyle’s Reminiscences, a hundred years since Alexander Carlyle’s New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, Froude’s posthumous My Relations with Carlyle, and Alexander Carlyle and Sir James Crichton-Browne’s The Nemesis of Froude. Everyone has long since ...”

“... folk arts and crafts with Art Nouveau stylisations, and a group of young men (Sergei Diaghilev, Alexander Benois, Leon Bakst) now began to see peasant art as falling in line with the new European taste for the exotic and the primitive. The Ballets Russes, arising from an attempt to create a fictive Russian past using artistic techniques that would appeal to ...”

“... in the wrong place. In his elegant and meditative memoir, Silent Dialogues, Nemerov’s son Alexander attempts to tease out the connections between his father’s poetry and his aunt’s photography and the tensions between their two personalities: The world for my father responded only to his intelligence … Arbus, by contrast, could see the world as ...”

“... I bought from him more than ten years ago, maybe fifteen years ago, which I first saw with Robert Armstrong in late December 1980 in his studio in Gorey, Co. Wexford, rests against the wall of the room where I work. We are uneasy with each other now. The talk turns to Christmas and he mentions the sadness of Gorey and that extraordinary space he made ...”

“... His birth certificate, which Mantle hasn’t bothered to examine, shows that his father, William Robert Archer, lived at 48 Highbury Grove, then a North London boarding-house owed by one Mrs Rhoda Bowness. His occupation is given as ‘journalist’. The mother, Lola Howard Archer, lived separately over the Thames at a now-vanished address in Southwark ...”

“... today. Enough material there for a whole case-history. Notwithstanding the title of Paul Alexander Juutilainen’s recent film docubiog about Marcuse, Herbert the Hippopotamus, the slack-sphinctered pachyderm in LaRouche’s first sentence refers not to Marcuse, late consort of Korsch, Davis and the Weathermen, nor even to Lyndon Jr’s own ...”

“... speak’. At 15, Callow comments, the boy’s manner resembled that of ‘an old buffer ... an Alexander Woollcott’, and Thomson notes that throughout his life ‘he adored and worshipped old age.’ Welles’s forced maturity was the work of both parents, from whom he learned to think of childhood as a form of illness or deficiency, a ‘pestilential ...”

“... in twenty years of anti-Albanian repression at the hands of Tito’s Minister of the Interior, Alexander Rankovc. Tito’s 1974 Constitution defined Kosovo as an ‘autonomous province’ and improved conditions for Albanians, who used it to create new institutions and improve education. Many Serbs, however, began to see the Constitution as an attempt to ...”

“... Corps came across an Afghan man who had been wounded in a helicopter strike. The patrol leader, Alexander Blackman, executed him, admitting unabashedly that he was violating the Geneva Conventions. He didn’t realise that one of his men was wearing a helmet camera. The execution was treated as an outrage even within the army: Blackman was arrested and ...”

“... Winter’s Tale dramatises a prose romance from 1588, Pandosto, appropriately written by the same Robert Greene who accused Shakespeare of being a plagiaristic ‘upstart crow’, while both The Tempest and Cymbeline borrow from Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, a creaky anonymous play of the early 1580s about an exiled courtier who lives in a cave and ...”

“... I fear only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had been merely a friendly discussion. All this was the background to the Crimean War of 1853-55, the subject of Orlando Figes’s admirable book. The war was at once the most dramatic ...”

“... as the mark of an inexperienced and artless ruling class. Even an avowed originalist like Robert Bork, unsuccessfully nominated by Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1987, concedes that ‘self-confident legal institutions do not require so much talking about.’ But Scalia and Bork forged their ideas in battle against a liberal jurisprudence that was ...”

“... to Blackstone and Pope to Pitt; and at Kenwood in Hampstead he constructed a mansion, designed by Robert Adam, and a park which remain a high point of British design. Norman Poser is not Mansfield’s first biographer, but he is arguably the best so far. The first, John Holliday, wrote his not always reliable memoir shortly after Mansfield’s death. Then ...”