“... comparison with the English poet gives no idea of Magowan’s poetry, nor does this at the end of Robert Peters’s Introduction: ‘I am reminded, finally, of that stunning moment in Alfred Tennyson’s neglected masterpiece “Maud”, where his hero, confronting madness, meditates on the fragility of the human brain, seen via the image of a seashell. Like ...”

“... What is more important: is it the project of understanding why sexual desire is, or has become, a problem for us like no other, fraught with particular anxiety and special perplexity; or is it the task of establishing – maintaining, perhaps – principles according to which this desire can be regulated, guided, temporised? The change in relations between the sexes and the concomitant change in relations between members of the same sex, the double alteration that has come over us in the last two or three generations makes a certain kind of intellectual investigation possible for the first time ...”

“... however invidious comparisons may be, is of a mixture of Browning, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Robert Lowell, with something of Whitman’s breezy effect of easing himself in poetry’s words. If that sounds bizarre – well, she is in many ways a bizarre writer. Her ways with rhythm and sound effects seem too spontaneous to be experimental, though they ...”

“... of a reformed sinner castigating his own erstwhile lapses’ – and variously attributed to Robert Henderson and Angus Morrison. Music Ho! is more accurately prophetic, too, than Motion allows. He deems rather improbable the hailing of Sibelius as avatar of the music of the future: yet Sibelius’s symphonic form-building is seen more clearly in its ...”

“... when ‘each church recognised the catholicity and independence of the other.’ No easy matter. Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes in Old Catholics and Anglicans about the difficulty of trying to be both catholic and independent. But that is what Baxter claimed to be – and thought the Church of England should be. N.H. Keeble has ...”

“... does not die. It is fascinating to notice that when the Congress for Cultural Freedom dispatched Robert Lowell to South America he refused to tell lies and play the part of CIA Virgil. Instead he freaked, sent telegrams to the Pope on the theme of ‘America as the Roman Empire’, insulted every general he met, tried to climb all the equestrian statues in ...”

“... and to carry the audience by theatre when fact and logic weakened. It was even possible, as Robert Brentano demonstrated in a brilliant essay on Stubbs in the Journal of British Studies (May 1967), to carry an audience by appealing to its national sense of sound. Problems will inevitably arise when tradition slides into advocacy or when the health of a ...”

“... is well-known. A few belong to both categories; those in the second include Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo; others, however, are nonentities. The temptation to dismiss the list out of hand is, as the authors agree, almost irresistible. They have, however, succeeded in establishing to their satisfaction that, apart from the ...”

“... certainly shouldn’t have sold it to me. Three years ago, in a television interview, the doughty Robert McKenzie tried to extract from Ingrams the theoretical basis for his bedroom coverage. Ingrams began by declaring piously that he wouldn’t go into someone’s private life just for the sake of it: but added that with politicians ‘one cannot make a ...”

“... and admiring and funny reminiscences by Auden’s friends, notably in the Conversations of Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, hardly sentimental, inexperienced or patient observers of the human scene. The comments on Auden display only in an extreme form the mentality at work here, with its incapacity for understanding, accuracy or minimum ...”

“... The ‘major reinterpretation’ of City and Crown politics, promised by Professor Ashton in his book on the English Civil Wars, and long awaited, has now been published in a slim volume covering the years from 1603 to the outbreak of the Civil War. Put briefly, his theme runs thus. The city fathers, defenders of monarchy, not Parliament, under James I, and again allied to the Crown from the autumn of 1641, were nevertheless temporarily ‘alienated’ from their natural ally during the 1630s ...”

“... may seem to evade our questions by not allowing the wholly uneducated to speak. (The silence of Robert Martin in Emma, the character nearest to a working man, saves her from having to represent accented speech.) Yet on Emma’s left in the diagram we have all Austen’s vulgar characters, as well as her women – many are, in fact, the same people. It does ...”

“... of the end, which came in Lisbon in 1974. If there was a new beginning, it happened then. Robert Dahl, whom Anderson does not mention, dates the start of what he regards as the most recent of the three great waves of enthusiasm for liberal democracy, the one we’re riding now, to Portugal in 1975. Prompted by these events and a wider ...”

“... debate in academic and cultural life in America. Her subjects range from the attempts to suppress Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs (the famous print of Mapplethorpe with a whip inserted into his anus is reproduced in evidence) to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, to the way the exposé of Paul de Man’s early anti-Semitic writings has been used to ...”

“... thinker and activist, and so this religious side of his thought often gets overlooked. Even Robert Westbrook’s splendid John Dewey and American Democracy slighted it. The enthusiastic welcome which that book deservedly received, when it was published in 1991, had the unfortunate effect of causing an equally good book, which emphasised this religious ...”