“... the avoidance of historical issues; Foucault is prised apart from Derrida despite the efforts of Frank Lentricchia to assimilate them to one another in their ‘understanding of history’. In fact, the message of most of the contributors is unequivocal. Not only is it wrong to accuse Derrida of being (as Terry Eagleton puts it) ‘grossly ...”

“... Mr Dagge the keeper, like Johnson’s own tough old drunken doctor friend of later years, Robert Levet, joins this company of the blest in the land of all our wishes. Of course Johnson is in no way deceived, either by his own feelings for Savage or by Savage’s own persistent fantasy projections of the self. Johnson’s most persistent fascination ...”

“... millenarian preachers among them) that 1857 marked the centenary of the Battle of Plassey, when Robert Clive asserted East India Company ascendancy in Bengal. In the event, it was gun cartridges that set the mutiny off: they were greased, the sepoys believed, with a blend of cow and pig fat, which would defile both Hindus and Muslims when they bit the ends ...”

“... at a discount. And then I read a memorial interview with that old self-server and mass-murderer Robert McNamara. He recalled an occasion, quite early in the Lyndon Johnson presidency, when Jackie had come up to him at a reception in New York and beaten her fists on his chest, calling on him to stop the killing in Vietnam. Of course, one could object and say ...”

“... to think of it, British recognition of Bishop herself was belated; for decades she was upstaged by Robert Lowell, probably because he lived in England and behaved in a way that seemed more certifiably poetic. Now Merrill is available to the English in a slim volume of his best work, selected by him shortly before his death in 1995. Merrill was far from ...”

“... rhyme, can hope to convey both their individual voices and their collective charm. It is here that Robert Kehew’s anthology, Lark in the Morning, succeeds so brilliantly. Kehew’s bilingual edition includes 28 poets and 55 songs, extending from the ‘First Troubadour’, Guillem de Peiteus (1071-1127, but see the cautions above), to the last, Guiraut ...”

“... shipwreck, showmanship, early death – also bring to mind the life and career of Robert Louis Stevenson, another Scottish writer who looked at human adventure as a brand of metaphysics. Nowadays, people with a heart for proper adventure (or ‘extreme sports’) like to load themselves with equipment and dive into the ocean looking for ...”

“... 11, leaving the family $8 after funeral expenses had been paid. Frost’s mother, Isabelle, took Robert and his sister east from San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they lived initially with her parents-in-law before Isabelle tried – with mixed results – to hold down a job as a teacher. Frost was many things before he was a poet; by the time ...”

“... of Mr Dewey’s philosophy are the deficiencies of the American scene itself.’ Waldo Frank, writing in 1929, said that ‘it is just to liken John Dewey to a child.’ Entering his ninth decade as World War Two began, Dewey was constantly told that, since he did not share the grown-ups’ belief in ‘objective moral truth’, he could not answer ...”

“... separated the theatres, one behind the other, on a vast paved piazza. But something there is, as Robert Frost says, that does not like a wall. From any angle, these schemes suggested disguised factories for making some plebeian product – meat pies, perhaps – inexplicably thrusting out of the harbour, the same problem that had inspired the soon to be ...”

“... domestic surveillance programme, determined that the man who had fallen from the window was Frank Olson, a chemist employed by the CIA. Hersh disclosed his findings to Olson’s family, who convened a press conference and announced that they would be suing the agency. Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, was alerted to the danger by his ...”

“... the country’s emerging counter-culture, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones and Robert Creeley. It also ran a selection of the early work of a maverick graduate student in English at the University of Tulsa, Ted Berrigan. Berrigan was soon accompanying Brainard and his fellow editors, the poets Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup, on their forays ...”

“... the right to own guns ‘granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright’. But as Frank Smyth points out in his new history of the NRA, the organisation was actually founded because a group of Union Army veterans were dismayed by how few Americans actually knew how to shoot, particularly compared with Europeans. According to one of its ...”

“... but Faraday’s letters teem with erotemes and interrogations. (Many of the question marks are Frank James’s editorial insertions: Faraday tended to overlook them in his haste to move on to the next inquiry.) Faraday asks, and is asked in turn, by Oxford gentleman-geologists and provincial glassworks clerks, by crown princes and loving nieces. He admits ...”

“... just press one note and bend her ear toward the keyboard and listen to it, and press it again.’ Frank Zappa was in the audience, and after Nico left the stage, did a parody of her set, playing random chords and yelling nonsense. Perhaps he couldn’t bear her seriousness, that she took her time and listened to herself, leaning into the note rather than ...”