“... Words upon the Window-Pane, come up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t much to his point, since what he really means is ...”

“... of history to a vassal of economics. The two most famous works in this genre were both written by Robert Fogel, who was thus established as midwife and guru, entrepreneur and high priest, of this new cult. The first, Railroads and American Economic Growth, was an audaciously-conceived study which cut the iron horse so emphatically down to size, by exploring a ...”

“... Gascon, Poulidor le Limousin, Georges Meunier le Pêcheur de Vierzon, and the hope for the future, Robert Alban, is Bamban le Caladois. Regional races, such as Paris-Roubaix, the Tour de I’Ouest or the Tour de I’Avenir, give great scope for local reputations to be displayed and sustained. Dr Holt is right to see the Tour de France, and perhaps cycling in ...”

“... informed and highly readable on Tennyson’s modern standing; on the strengths and limitations of Robert Frost; and on critics (Yvor Winters especially, but also Eliot and Richards) whose quirks he sets off against their more authoritative judgments. Here he writes with an assurance that values are relative but arguable, that criticism, as he puts ...”

“... became a highly-paid lecturer. He died in 1944. Leacock held his own in the world of Will Rogers, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, the early Wodehouse, A.P. Herbert and ‘Beachcomber’. Americans, or some of them, accepted him as a successor to Mark Twain. His Yankee-style hyperbole did not, for once, upset the British, for he practised the tricks of ‘sly ...”

“... Szakall.Before Auden came on the scene Chester had taken the fancy of a New York financier, Robert King (‘not his real name’). King duly enrolled as a patient with Dr Kallman, and after a little bridgework had broken the ice, invited the dentist to supper at the Astor Roof. There was presumably some routine orthodontic small talk (‘How’s the ...”

“... the mimicry notably a defence. There is also a curious deadness about the letters to his friend Robert Buckingham. One senses something dreadful happening, but the very superficiality of the later letters makes it hard to identify: is Forster drifting away from a world on which he has no purchase, or is he being suffocated? The ‘public Forster’ of the ...”

“... Impartial Enquiry into the Conduct of Viscount Townshend’) and of Walpole (The Conduct of Robert Walpole Esq’), both published in 1717. The fact would be puzzling, for they were bitter opponents of Harley, whose cause Defoe seems to have spent much energy in championing: indeed Walpole was Harley’s chief accuser and persecutor. This prompts Sill ...”

“... regaining ‘the right to manage’. In writing The Enemies Within MacGregor has been assisted by Robert Tyler, late of the tabloid press, but my guess is that the strange mixture of Zane Grey Western and Harvard Business School management-speak which MacGregor’s ghost employs in place of English prose accurately reflects his employer’s mode of ...”

“... Land art, Performance art, Living sculpture, Body art and Community art. Kramer is unimpressed by Robert Smithson’s ‘ambition ... to break with the conventions of studio production and museum exhibitions in order to create an art that would stand in a more intimate and vital relationship to the world of nature and to the man-made social ...”

“... writing: in addition to sermons preached by others, there were the law lectures ascribed to Robert Chambers, the parliamentary debates he ‘altered and disguised’ from others’ notes and published as ‘Debates in the Senate of Lilliput’ in the Gentleman’s Magazine, and the ‘Last Solemn Declaration’ of Dr Dodd, the ‘macaroni parson’, who ...”

“... Ada Kennard, a dancer in a three-women act that toured the music halls. His father was a Bob: Robert Moffat Livingstone, at different times a seafarer, a window cleaner and a stagehand. According to their son, the couple hadn’t wanted children. Then one night in September 1944, Bob ran out of condoms. The memoirist writes of his conception, ‘With ...”

“... understand, are the pure products of disordered digestion’. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton wrote that the stomach is the ‘king of the belly, because if he be distempered, all the rest suffer with him.’ Early 19th-century physicians agreed: ‘It is a great mistake to regard dyspepsia as peculiarly or especially a disease of the ...”

“... history of the universe for ever, whatever the nature of time, and that this is vastly important. Robert Frost comes a long way with Johnston, but is, in the end, even more strict: ‘There is no future life to defer to. I see all salvation limited to here and now.’ It makes the heart sink most strangely to consider those who do nothing but good in ...”

“... and its urgency (perhaps neither of them especially Bishop-like qualities anyway), and the Robert Louis Stevenson or Hans Christian Andersen idea, now gone mousy and a little folksy, fails to survive.A Bishop poem (watch it closely) goes on looking long after one thinks it should have looked away – from having seen enough, from having got or given ...”