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“... Writers in the early part of our century fell in love with the interminable work, the book that seemed infinite. The Cantos, Remembrance of Things Past, The Man without Qualities were all tasks designed to last the writer’s lifetime, and they did. But there are degrees and differences among these projects. The Cantos were a ragbag, as Pound once half-mockingly called them, into which he could throw the contents of his mind in the form of poetry, but they were a ragbag that dreamed of a secret ordering ...”

“... 1975), and in English by Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984), involves giving a detailed description of events in the lives of ordinary people and is almost always based on court records – A Trial of Witches is a good, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter a fine, and Shaman of ...”

“... shaman Harry Smith, is arcane, but the critical world has been primed for its reappearance. Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good and Greil Marcus’s The Invisible Republic – recent accounts of the curious development of American folk music – both devote considerable space to the Smith collection, making impressive claims on its ...”

“... she lived in the age of ‘Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven’. I do not believe that the parallels Robert Wallace draws, in Jane Austen and Mozart (1983), between her fictional and his orchestral structures can be sustained in the detail Mr Wallace proposes, but he does indicate how small an opportunity Jane Austen had to know the composers Professor Halperin ...”

“... There are brief excursions from the central dialogues: one to the old lady’s husband, Robert, who hears a susurrus of women’s voices in his flat in Positano. Beneath the old woman’s bedroom, by a convex mirror (whose symbolism is tactfully indicated), a man takes notes. It is all poised, very deliberately, at the point where enigma borders ...”

“... the inevitable Henry Kissinger, Mr Moon, Vice-President Bush and the President of the World Bank, Robert McNamara. More serious was the realisation that the antique-dealer, Deverini, who was accused of having helped Gelli to enter Monaco illegally, had earlier been accused of murder. It was remembered, too, that a Colonel Salvatore Florio, who had once ...”

“... ineffectiveness was partly caused by ineffective leaders. Where was the Labor equivalent of Sir Robert Menzies – a man of great physical presence and even greater political cunning? The answer, when it finally came, was Gough Whitlam. He was a man of commanding height, a middle-class barrister like Menzies, a skilled debater, supremely self-confident, a ...”

“... Wordsworth’s genius lay in its own sort of negative capability. The most striking feature of his poetry, as of his personality, is their intense and intimate relations with what always remained outside them. He never seems identified with his own discoveries, even with the drama of his own sensibility. Yet what he writes is subtly and comfortingly self-confirmatory, never more so than when the world, the human heart, the music of humanity, the mountains, are speaking to him (‘as if admonished from another world’, ‘To give me human strength by apt admonishment ...”

“... end – or their end. Four of them – Blunden, Owen, Read and Sassoon – won the Military Cross. Robert Graves’s hard saying might stand as their watchword: ‘the only way out of the war is the way through it.’ Intellectually, they had much in common with pacifist Bloomsbury, but they had bound themselves to a separate caste and remained faithful to its ...”

“... of her flirtation with her brother-in-law, Clive Bell. Elizabeth Barrett turns out to be Vanessa, Robert Browning is revealed as Clive, and Flush is, of course, Virginia herself, the jealous third party. The extraordinary weight that Trombley places on Woolf’s guilt over this episode, which he considers one of the ‘two pivotal crises’ of her life, is ...”

“... Pierrot was transformed into an everyman of the Paris streets. Daumier’s versatile figure of Robert Macaire, ‘the quintessential con man’, originally a stage character satirising the July monarchy and its money men, became, as Baudelaire recalled, ‘the clear starting-point’ of the caricature of manners. Caricature ‘became the general satire of ...”

“... on his khaki shirt: he is wearing the B.P. hat – to which American boys are fully entitled. Robert Baden-Powell, a skilled dress-designer, ordered those cowboy hats from the States in 1900 when he was kitting out his nurses and constables in Africa. B.P. has recorded: ‘They were known in the trade as “Boss of the Plains” or ...”

“... that once she is raped Clarissa has no business doing anything except dying. And Donaldson quotes Robert Bage and Thomas Holcroft, lesser novelists than Richardson, but also less extreme in their dreams of women, willing to resist the notion of the fate worse than death. Hardy too, in Tess, offers a girl who is ruined and survives to die, Donaldson ...”

“... the story’s most appealing character, a refugee from the works of Calvino’s favourite writer, Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr Trelawney it is who performs the operation. This is a happy ending, but for the story’s youthful narrator it is also the moment of childhood’s end: Dr Trelawney, the tippling medic, leaves on a British ship, ‘hitched on board ...”

“... did. I’m going to be under fire until I am a reverend senior, if I live long enough to join the Robert Frost category. I’ll be all right, but at the moment it’s still stormy for me. I have received quite a lot of disagreeable notices from people to whom a subject of this sort is taboo, or who have a prescribed attitude for it from the liberal ...”