“... widely read. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) was a phenomenal bestseller, while Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888) has a good claim to be the greatest commercial success of the 19th century. But their reputations have not worn well, and this, too, helps to neutralise some of the hazards of Sanders’s territory. Since modern admiration and attention have ...”

“... his readers through a particular poem. Valéry, Allen Tate, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell were instructive in that way. But it is rare for a poet to lead readers through a poem, draft by draft, or explain how he settled for one word rather than another. Yeats did not offer to ...”

“... better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker. In the meantime, Robert Dallek scooped him with ...”

“... done.’ Brown’s prosecution, ‘the first modern courtroom event’, is one of five cases that Robert Ferguson examines in The Trial in American Life. As Ferguson points out, America’s courtroom dramas have always done more than transform the reputation of the person at their centre: They also satisfy revenge, purge communal resentments, assign limits ...”

“... of all nations, has bowed down lowest in his presence. The ‘24-carat taste buds’ belong to Robert Parker, a 57-year-old former Baltimore lawyer, who started the bimonthly subscription-only Wine Advocate in 1978, and whose many books on the world’s wines – Bordeaux, The Wines of the Rhône Valley and Provence (1987) and various editions of the ...”

“... autobiography. He speaks to the camera, we hear him in voiceover, follow his life from army service in Italy in the Second World War to buying a coffin and talking to a priest. In practice, the film is mostly composed of dramatised flashbacks, where the past becomes the present and the future is temporarily forgotten. Scorsese also has the help of a ...”

“... as it turns out, is illegal for public employees in New York State), the union leader, Robert Toussaint, was sent to jail and otherwise ‘progressive’ residents spat venom at their train conductors, platform sweepers and track-layers for daring to walk off the job. During the strike I stayed overnight at a friend’s house because commuting from ...”

“... its music? The musicologist and advocate of the Scots language Billy Kay feels passionately about Robert Fergusson, the wild-child poet who died in the Edinburgh bedlam at 24. In Stromness, Montrose, Lochgelly, Stirling, he recited Fergusson’s verses. And then Karine Polwart sang the song that the dying Fergusson loved more than any other: ‘The Birks of ...”

“... London or Paris, and not the dialectical Freud of Lionel Trilling’s vision (‘we are ill in the service of health, or ill in the service of life’), but the Freud of much analytic practice in New York, and especially of the clinical lingo of the patients themselves. ‘Her Freudian leanings structured her life,’ Robins ...”

“... them with his own loyal troops, he stripped them of their uniforms, dismissed them from service and forbade them to come within a hundred miles of Rome on pain of death. Severus then constituted a new, hand-picked Guard from the best of the troops who had followed him. The auction story is impossible to resist and Guy de la Bédoyère duly starts ...”

“... of hundreds of bureaucrats based a few steps away from the White House. At the beginning of his service, Bolton writes, he sized Trump up as an inexperienced and impulsive administrator who had been poorly served by his ministers. Bolton says he believed that Trump’s paranoid and dogmatic tendencies were not innate, and clung to hopes that the president ...”

“... to form its own organisation, which, if not paramilitary, would at least replace military service by non-combatant service. This was the Chantiers de la Jeunesse. Its director, General de La Porte du Theil, a kind of Vercingetorix, ‘the peasant with the long moustaches’, was eventually arrested by the Gestapo in ...”

“... candidate for the position of staff counsel to McCarthy’s investigating committee. His rival was Robert F. Kennedy, whose father and older brother were McCarthy supporters. These two intensely ambitious and utterly ruthless young men, as alike as peas in a pod, hated each other. Their rivalry ended only with Bobby’s death. Cohn got the much sought-after ...”

“... to sound, to all but the most satirical minds, like truth and reason. They sound like honour and service and sacrifice and virtue, monuments of logic, and even cashing in is orderly, a triumph of calculation – you don’t have to ask your lymph glands about it or look at your spilling entrails. You might think the idea of a sequel to Catch-22 was a ...”

“... this young man, the son of a postal worker, born as one world war ends and thus of ideal age for service in the next. His home was Joppa, on the Firth of Forth, a ‘tram heaven’ boasting as it did one of the last cable tram systems (did he ever marvel at Glasgow’s strange-smelling subway in which coaches latched onto an ever-moving cable?). But steam ...”