“... trip. Whereas the Argentine showed extreme carelessness in the maintenance of his machine, Robert Persig meditated deeply on the importance of caring for the equipment we use. Che might have sympathised with some of Persig’s insights, but he would also have found them uncomfortable: ‘If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the ...”

“... Applying these thoughts to the Early Modern period – and particularly to the study of Robert Boyle – Shapin showed that science in this period, and by implication not only then, was effectively a gentleman’s agreement: that so-called objective criteria had more to do with etiquette than Truth; that Truth or what counted as truth was akin to ...”

“... was becoming virtually oppositional in the élitist cultural climate fostered by the new king. Robert Herrick’s poetry participated in Archbishop Laud’s campaign to re-sacramentalise traditional rituals, but pushed his libertine cult far beyond the churchmen’s moralism, celebrating the release from sexual constraints traditionally allowed during the ...”

“... author, William Jackson, a prominent figure in Exeter musical life. In a letter of 3 October 1799 Robert Southey sent Coleridge the unusual story he had recently heard from Jackson. At the age of 16 Bampfylde had gone to see the composer in Exeter, and had astonished him with his remarkable powers of improvisation on the harpsichord. Even after taking ...”

“... Mary Fiddler, a fine blooming lass of 18, her – is like silk itself, and bubbles as white as snow; she is just in her prime, and fit for business, she is broke in this spring, by a well-known gentleman of the turf. Her movements are regular, her pace elegant, and her action is good: and when you mount her, she begins to f—k away to the tune of the ‘Dandy O ...”

“... not self-conscious. His interest in the naked as a subject in art is, of course, related to this. Robert Hughes, in the passionate and polemical introduction to the catalogue of the London exhibition, quotes Degas, as reported by George Moore, on the subject of his female nudes: ‘I show them deprived of their airs and graces, reduced to the level of animals ...”

“... In the third book of Gulliver’s Travels there is a gobbledygook machine. Designed by the ingenious academicians of Lagado, it consists of a frame filled with vocables that can be shuffled at the turn of a crank, and its brave technological purpose is to generate a universe of discourse. What it manufactures, of course, is scrambled poppycock: for language is the product neither of cranks nor yet of chips, but of the human mind as it projects one ruling competence onto a diversity of actual tongues ...”

“... arms deals, the drug-smuggling operations, and the still unconfirmed CIA activities described by Robert Woodward in Veil. While fully agreeing with many of her views, I think Didion is slightly naive, as if the Cuban exiles of Miami were the only such group with émigré interests at work in the US Government and its entrepreneurial adjuncts. Think of the ...”

“... though, are the sensuous ‘Dream of Zinc Cream’, on body-surfing, and Mr James’s tribute to Robert Hughes’s magnificent The Fatal Shore, the book in which the story of the convicts in Australia, related in many accounts, is finally unforgettably told. This essay is amongst other things a passionate defence of the benefits expatriation has brought to a ...”

“... had possessed the native cynicism of Leigh Hunt himself, or – a rather different kind – of Robert Bloomfield, the rustic poet who in 1804 had been paid nearly £4000 for his two little volumes, he would have ruined his gift but he might have made big money. As it was, his best things are so good because they were not the things he wanted to do. The ...”

“... post-war foreign policy ‘establishment’: Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen, George Kennan, Robert Lovett, John McCloy and Averell Harriman. All were men whose influence derived less from their official station than from their social position, their professional and intellectual accomplishments, their personal prestige and their friendship with one ...”

“... of this is Mitchell, who teaches at an institution whose mascot is not Barney but Aristotle? When Robert Bakker urges us in The Dinosaur Heresies (1986) to say, when we see Canada geese flying north, ‘The dinosaurs are migrating, it must be spring!’ we know, Mitchell argues, ‘that the cart is pulling the horse’. Surely this is a charge that could be ...”

“... object is to transmute matter into spirit. ‘Writing is primarily an experience of language,’ Robert Creeley said, and Popa reaches back to the folk tradition of riddles, charms, proverbs, nursery rhymes and exorcisms for clues about how to make poems. What he is after are the eyes and ears of the anonymous folk poet who could hear flowers growing, the ...”

“... Among Montale’s many translators, Arrowsmith and Galassi are more faithful to the original; Robert Lowell and Jeremy Reed take greater licence. Galassi’s translations ‘sound’ better than Arrowsmith’s and have a more reliable sense of what Montale wrote than either Lowell’s or Reed’s. But only Lowell, in the ten versions gathered in ...”

“... Rose [Lee] virus’. Although Davis strings us along for a page, this bit is from a 1952 Robert Heinlein novella. One hundred million house mice did indeed overrun the Southern Californian town of Taft in 1926, and the picture of ‘Federal men killing mice’ with what look like scythes is a documentary photograph not a science fiction film ...”