“... volumes of the English version. It was Keene who first discovered Konishi, making him known to Robert Brower and myself when Keene wrote Brower that Konishi’s Nihon Bungakushi was by all odds the best going. We got the book, and in due course Konishi arrived to spend 15 months at Stanford (when Sir George Sansom was writing his history of Japan ...”

“... is another purpose to the book, aside from the obvious; Hughes’s big bang may be a distraction. Robert Frost once confided to his friend Sidney Cox that ‘I have written to keep the over-curious out of the secret places of my mind both in my verse and in my letters to such as you.’ With his verse and his letters it may be that Hughes, too, has satisfied ...”

“... fear of stimulating anti-semitism turned Leo Frank into a gentile Yankee businessman. But Robert Rossen, the young Jewish Communist who adapted the story for the screen, didn’t forget what he saw as his own betrayal of the Jews. A decade later, directing the first Hollywood Jewish/black buddy film, Body and Soul, Rossen made the last shot of They ...”

“... we can do this depends not just on the conditions in which we die, but on how we have lived. Robert Maxwell probably departed this world in circumstances which, in any literal sense, made the whole notion of such performance quite irrelevant. But even if he had passed away in bed with all his faculties intact, it is doubtful that be would have been able ...”

“... and cold and inconsiderate. One begins to see parallels with Lawrance Thompson’s quest for Robert Frost: as Thompson, at first a hero-worshipper, dredged deeper into the material that eventually became his big biography, the hero began more and more to take on the lineaments of a monster. When she set out on her quest for the truth, Polly already knew ...”

“... 3 July. My TV film The Insurance Man has won the ‘Beautiful Human Life Award’ in Japan and Robert Hines, the young actor who starred in the film, has been out to Tokyo to collect the citation. He calls round with a souvenir for me. It is a headband as worn by Kamikaze pilots. In the market today: ‘Listen, there’s nothing you can teach me about ...”

“... statist designs of the New Deal, the New York World’s Fair, Nazi Germany and the urban plans of Robert Moses, meant to confirm leftist suspicions that the Western democracies are proto-fascist. Nonetheless, Hart’s novelistic treatment of 1940 reveals a wild grain in his conservatism, a sympathy with maverick energies that has occasionally disturbed the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... troubled attitude to flesh and blood is only part of the story of disgust. The deliberate echo of Robert Burton in his title signals his wish to produce a meditation on the natural history of disgust and his belief that it is as much hard-wired as socially induced. His claim is that ‘for all its visceralness’ disgust ‘is one of our more aggressive ...”

“... does he find a curious sub-genre of conceptual art, as in certain works-on-paper by Les Levine and Robert Morris which in effect are, as well as are of, financial instruments Further examples: a joke cheque by Duchamp with which he paid a dentist’s bill, or a ten D-mark bill on which Joseph Beuys writes ‘Kunst = KAPITAL,’ and signs it, giving it a value ...”

“... recording their fashionable clothes, pink cheeks and languid arrogance. Some, like the master of Robert Burns’s ‘Twa Dogs’, had set out in a ‘frolic daft’ simply To make a tour an’ tak a whirl To learn bon ton and see the worl’. But the ostensible purpose of the Grand Tour – a term coined in the mid-century – was the completion of a ...”

“... creative urge, at its most interesting when most devious. He was certainly a double man. (Robert Louis Stevenson had perceptively commented on ‘the note of ambiguity and deceit’ which already ‘brooded over’ Taken from the Enemy.) And a more than Edwardian richness, as well as ambiguity, broods over Susan Chitty’s ...”

“... 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 ...”