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“... as though what’s going on out there were more interesting to her than the rigmarole in the car. Robert Siodmak, the director, told her what to do in minute detail, forcing her to play down her performance. Whoever deserves the credit, the result is a little piece of perfection, a rare instance of downbeat, off-guard grace. Gardner was never so good ...”

“... Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public life. But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style ...”

“... a demand for massive reparation payments to black Americans. The Monroe Ride was hosted by Robert Franklin Williams. Nicknamed ‘Chairman Rob’ by his supporters, Williams was second only to the Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X as an outspoken advocate of ‘armed self-reliance’. The head of the Monroe branch of the NAACP in the 1950s, he assembled ...”

“... He turned down the executors who asked him to write an ending for the novel left unfinished at Robert Louis Stevenson’s death, but agreed to complete his friend Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade (in which a clairvoyant nurse outsmarts and outbikes her would-be murderer across two continents) when Allen’s fatal illness left the serial with several months to ...”

“... You can follow the same trail that led to a network ban in the US on the repeat showing of a Robert Fisk documentary criticising Israel. If enough powerful people – which means enough people with control over the major public communications in the US – make enough noise on behalf of victims in their team (more deserving of interest and concern than ...”

“... the country wants full integration with Europe or the alternative preferred by Conrad Black and Robert Conquest – joining the US, Canada and Mexico in Nafta. God knows what the answer would be but at least we will have been asked a real question. As it is, we have a quarrel between varieties of fudge, a settled determination not to let the electorate ...”

“... it is. Neither the CEPH nor figures like Cohen seem in any way unique. From wartime Los Alamos (Robert Oppenheimer) to Sony Electronics (Akio Morita) to Apple Computer (Steve Jobs) to the controversial Icelandic genetics database company deCode (Kári Stefánsson – Rabinow’s next subject), ambiguous forms and uncertain norms were given a practical ...”

“... or desire. There are few scenes more melancholy in 19th-century fiction, or in paintings such as Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s The Last Day in the Old Home, than the enforced sale of household goods. Thackeray made a specialism of clearance, in Vanity Fair and then again in The Newcomes; George Eliot followed suit, at length, in The Mill on the ...”

“... here, for the peculiarity of ‘Tu ti spezzasti’ is in its expressive abandonment of precision. Robert Lowell’s notion, in Imitations, of endeavouring above all to catch ‘the tone’ or, failing that, at least ‘a tone’ seems a better guide. The waywardnesses which are wholly wrong in some of Lowell’s other translations have an aptness in his ...”

“... in entropy, not to mention proclivity for paranoia, he shares), Harry Mathews, Joseph McElroy, Robert Coover and Don DeLillo. Often this distinction between Modernists and Postmodernists is artificial, and Gaddis seems to write in the gap between the two dispensations, between different orders of linguistic imagination; and here other peers come to mind as ...”

“... writers are in the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia may not be the Isle of Man, but legs ...”

“... contain huge leaps in time, which are intended to illustrate this. Her American readership is like Robert Frost’s: read by every American schoolchild, both have to be rescued from the flag-wavers with strenous reminders of their ‘dark’ seriousness and formal excellence. In Cather’s case, there is also the rich and bedeviling problem of how to frame her ...”

“... price of gold; and they did this while cursing the work.’ (In his Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, Robert Burton condemned ‘that pestilent booke’, ‘not to be read without shuddering’.) Minois delights in strange, Eco-esque vignettes of doomed book-hunting obsessives, like Christina, the daughter of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who criss-crossed ...”

“... messages to me although he’d actually died several years before. I told my psychiatrist about Robert De Niro saying ‘cunt’ when I asked him to while I was watching Casino on TV. She reconsidered her revision of my diagnosis from paranoid to residual schizophrenia. I began campaigning for the release of the most famous paranoid schizophrenic in the ...”

“... in the 20th century, until there emerged what Sedlak calls the ‘chlorine dilemma’. In 1974, Robert Harris, an employee of the Environmental Defense Fund, conducted research in New Orleans and found that ‘men whose drinking water came from the Mississippi River had a 15 per cent higher chance of dying from cancer than men who consumed well ...”