“... novels began to be rediscovered in the 1970s. While researching his screenplay for Chinatown, Robert Towne came across Ask the Dust and took up Fante’s cause. He optioned the novel and persuaded Francis Ford Coppola to do the same for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned ...”

“... The Nemesis of Faith (1849) by his disciple and too frank biographer J.A. Froude to Mary Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888). The German setting and European (and occasionally Asian and African) frame of reference seem to make this a cosmopolitan rather than an English or Scottish text. It was translated into Dutch in 1880 and into German and Polish in ...”

“... is now not only our poem, but the poem of Keats, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats, Eliot, Auden. Only Robert Graves and Laura Riding saw through it; but to return with them to the Shakespeare of Donne and Marvell is to abolish the Shakespeare of Keats and Yeats. Malone’s edition, of course, had a more problematic consequence for Shakespeare: it had him pining ...”

“... of some financial economists has been more clearly performative. Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton’s Nobel Prize-winning option pricing equation of 1973 – which I described two years ago as ‘the single most important breakthrough in the modern mathematical theory of finance’* – didn’t originally describe the market prices of ...”

“... disjointed articles that often contained internal contradictions.’ Little wonder that Sir Robert Anderson of the Criminal Investigation Department said that enough nonsense was written about the Whitechapel murders to sink a dreadnought. As in the Palmer and Bravo cases, inquests were crucial in maintaining the level of excitement. The ...”

“... her novels about Cyril (who for some unaccountable reason Spufford thinks is called Hugh), Anthea, Robert and Jane and their magical adventures. The first is Five Children and It (1902) – the fifth child being their baby brother; ‘It’ being the Psammead, or sand fairy, a creature that looks a bit like a monkey with eyes on stalks, can grant a wish a day ...”

“... way of ‘learning from Las Vegas’ very different from the Postmodern reading presented by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour in 1972), and in a brilliant book in 1971, examined Los Angeles (which he regarded as a good approximation of the Futurist city) in terms of ‘geography, climate, economics, demographics, mechanics and ...”

“... From here Donne inched his way towards preferment. He became an MP, and found favour with Sir Robert Drury, who took him to France and the Low Countries in 1611-12. Absence always worked powerfully on Donne’s imagination, and according to Izaak Walton, his friend and first biographer, he had a vision while on this trip: ‘I have seen my dear wife pass ...”

“... of lies and violence with the likes of Dick Cheney, Gerry Adams, Vladimir Putin, Jacques Chirac or Robert Mugabe, none of whom has anything to learn from anyone about the uses of power. Advisers are always at hand. But Blair has chosen on the whole to be surrounded by trusted acolytes rather than disinterested experts. This may have done less harm to his ...”

“... even more suburban San Fernando Valley, much was written about Richard Meier’s architecture and Robert Irwin’s gardens. Remarkably little was written about the parking garage, though it’s the first structure you encounter on arriving at the Getty. (Theoretically, you could take a bus there, but this is, after all, a museum in LA up on a bluff above the ...”

“... poets, he had a religious sense but no religion, except for the White Goddess, whom he found in Robert Graves. Having experienced an epiphany, he had a strong though not entirely easy personal connection with this goddess, believing she would ensure that he would never have a happy love, and that he would die at 29. Michael Bakewell, the agent he settled ...”

“... could possibly identify. But apart from being evasive, this is inept. In the film The Fog of War, Robert McNamara presents the first of his 11 rules of war: ‘Empathise with the enemy.’ Suicide bombing kills far fewer people than conventional warfare; the reactions it provokes must, therefore, reside somewhere other than in the number of the dead. It ...”

“... the trees./The cheapest dance-song utters all they feel.’ The lines prompted sharp comment from Robert Graves, which caused Lewis to write to him, defending the poem as an expression of ‘simple cosmic loneliness’. Graves replied: ‘To feel cosmic loneliness I think means merely that one is short of friends who think cosmically.’ Having found in Freda ...”

“... thy remnant shall fall by the sword … Thus will I make thy lewdness to cease from thee.’ Sir Robert Anderson, in charge of the investigation in its early stages, later wrote in his memoir that his chief suspect was a ‘low-class Jew’. But this man, whom he does not name, was almost certainly Aaron Kosminski, who was incarcerated in an asylum though ...”

“... a grizzled and garrulous 1960s Californian sage who seems to have escaped from the later work of Robert M. Pirsig (Lila rather than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). The passing landscape remains real, but the secondary figures in it are so insubstantial that only Kellas and Astrid are alive, and their surviving vigour sometimes seems in ...”