“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as she was by the subsequent break-up of her wartime affair with the radio writer Gordon Glover. Robert Liddell, in his contribution to Dale Salwak’s volume, objects to too tragic a view of ‘Barbara’s hobby (generally enjoyable) of “unrequited love” ’, and as a friend of hers since 1932 his view has to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, Barbara ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which she joins young and old together by dramatising obsessive and almost psychotic continuities. Robert Kelway, the traitor hero from The Heat of the Day, who is giving away secrets to the enemy from his job at the War Office, is traced to his childhood in peculiarly prosperous and loveless suburban surroundings – or rather not traced, for Bowen is never ...”

“... said to me ... that of the literary men he had known only three struck him as positively evil: Robert Frost, Yeats and Brecht!’) Paul Tillich saying: ‘We have two and one-half Communist representatives on the council. The half is Bert Brecht.’ And Eric Bentley and Lotte Lenya lament Brecht’s lack of decency and manners. It would be one thing to ...”

“... vote. Three essays provide insights into the changing social basis of Conservative support. Robert Waller’s position as research director for the Harris opinion poll has given him access to the surveys undertaken for the Conservative Party over the last thirty years. Here, simultaneously, is evidence of who voted Conservative and of the perceptions ...”

“... Ross into contact with the then-embryo Algonquin network. In 1919, George Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and the others were in their twenties and unknown. But they were wits, albeit at each other’s expense much of the time, and Ross watched with interest from the sidelines, every so often giving out ‘teamsterlike snorts’ of ...”