“... Prague’s history. The first time Hero picks it up, she reads about a second-hand bookshop whose stone walls expel scraps of 16th-century parchment, bits of letters exchanged within a love triangle at the court of Rudolf II. On Thea’s second read, the book tells the story of a woman known as ‘the Uglifier’ who surreptitiously cuts the hair of ...”

“... one case,’ he said, ‘whether it’s here’ – he meant Garvaghy Road – ‘or the murder of Robert Hamill, or whatever. I think it was the cumulative effect of all the cases. I think it was the fact that she had taken a number of cases very successfully against the RUC. We said away last year that Rosemary needed protection and she was never given ...”

“... her holy presence, not to listen to the once volatile, trance-inducing music. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in 1974 Smith (née Smith), who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is ...”

“... things he wished he could do – ‘a dozen Chekhov-Shakespeare novels’, as one of his editors, Robert Phelps, summarised a characteristic resolution; a life of Jesus; a novel about the atom bomb – were to become an almost public constituent of his writing life. His criticism is marked by the same mixture of yearning and disappointed hopes. Agee’s ...”

“... Dan Bern. His parents moved to Mount Vernon, Iowa, where Bern was born, round about the time that Robert Zimmerman started calling himself Bob Dylan and left Hibbing, Minnesota, to head circuitously east for New York City. Where Bern stands in relation to Dylan isn’t straightforward. He isn’t anything so crude as a tribute act: he performs his own ...”

“... the Fore River Shipyard. After the war he took a job as a trader with the brokerage firm Hayden, Stone, though he soon learned the big money was not in brokerage but in assisting business start-ups and mergers, then managing the new companies from the inside. The sources of his investment capital didn’t come from bootlegging – Nasaw lays that persistent ...”

“... to keep the ‘belly gods’ in check. Like all cultural expressions of the late modern condition, Robert Atkins and his low-carb kin both share in tradition and depart from it in telling ways. Consider how the LoCarbistas stand with respect to the appetites and the will. Virtually all the most popular diet writers of the last three decades thumb their noses ...”

“... a certain vagueness to the reality of the texts. In any case, the fact that Duras and her husband, Robert Antelme, joined the Resistance in 1943, and that Antelme was arrested and deported to Buchenwald, made any worries about her early novels seem less pressing. I now think that my own will to preserve the faint aura of mystery surrounding early Duras at the ...”

“... in the personality of his subject. He accepts the account of Rhodes’s restless mind given by Robert Rotberg in The Founder (1988), which remains compelling even if some of its psychoanalysis now seems forced (Rhodes has middle-child energy and is locked in an ‘oedipal struggle’ with President Kruger of the Transvaal). Rather than fleshing out ...”

“... as a result of the volume of sabre-rattling or the onset of war with Iran; a decision to sack Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating meddling in the 2016 election; a shutdown of the federal government to extort funds for the wall with Mexico; a sudden intensification of the president’s attacks on his political enemies and accusers in ...”

“... and passages are gone,When nettles wave upon a shapeless moundAnd saplings root among the broken stone.Nothing now roots among the broken stone: the site where the house once stood is cemented over, as though to contain uneasy spirits in the foundations. It is a palpable absence, a warning that this is what can happen to ...”

“... full of songs and stories’, a rooted world of crofts and farms stirred by travelling tinkers, stone-breakers and mendicant old soldiers, where a small boy could take lessons from ‘Dancy Reid, one of the last travelling Highland dance teachers’. Eventually, Henderson’s mother took a position as a cook-housekeeper in a large house near Yeovil: a part ...”

“... were drawn up of such notorious Communists or Communist sympathisers as Brian Walden, David Owen, Robert Mellish, John Stonehouse, Roy Hattersley and Reg Prentice; and even a bogus pamphlet on ‘revolutionary strategy’ for the installation of socialism in Britain was contrived for off-the-record briefing of American journalists, the joint ...”

“... more than prepared to come down from the mountain, and, if necessary, to rewrite his tablets of stone. These tablets shift, in the period covered by Woolford’s book, from the unitary long poem (Parcelsus, Sordello), to the conventional stage-plays with which Browning attempted to make his name in the 1840s (he wrote to Macready that A Blot in ...”

“... writes under the buckskin-evoking pseudonyms of George G. Gilman, Charles R. Pike, Thomas H. Stone. Like his compatriots ‘John G. MeLaglen’ and J.T. Edson, Harknett has ‘appreciation societies’ devoted to his pseudonymous personae. (‘J.T.’, incidentally, the biggest seller of them all, claims his name is genuine. It’s a happy ...”