“... Soviet Union was as much founded in the work of the 19th-century poetic realists Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson as in that of the 19th-century prosaic fantasists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ – but he would have been hard put to point to the aspects of fantasy in the works of ‘Marx, that old shaman’, the overwhelming majority of which were ...”

“... script realised in film, the skiing drama Downhill Racer, directed by Michael Ritchie and starring Robert Redford. Solo Faces is the story of a rock-climbing drifter and his friend and rival and their pursuit of glory through heroic feats on the mountain. In the earlier A Sport and a Pastime, the quarry, the struggled for peak, is perfect sexual love, though ...”

“... Roundhouse, the former engine-turning shed. Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of Gunslinger (and of Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Basil Bunting, David Jones and Roy Fisher), a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the ...”

“... some perplexity’. A short time later Eliot and Mansfield met at a dinner party in Hammersmith (Robert Graves was also present) where, she wrote, Eliot ‘grew paler and paler and more and more silent’ while their host (whom she likened to a butcher) ‘cut up, trimmed and smacked into shape the whole of America and the Americans’. The two, he without ...”

“... galvanising and transformative writers, to remain the Scotland Yeats had declared the ‘fruit of Robert Burns and Scott’ – ‘not a nation’ at all, but merely ‘a province with a sense of the picturesque’? I thought about that challenge when I attended a performance in Lochcarron by the Gaelic band Daimh. Their piper and singer, Calum Alex ...”

“... must sacrifice their freedom so that the species as a whole can be protected. (As the philosopher Robert Nozick put it, ‘utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for humans.’) The conservationist logic is at its most compelling at an aquarium like Monterey, with its state of the art research centre, environmental policy unit, and public education ...”

“... a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In George Peele’s Edward I, the Welsh bandit Prince Lluellen and his followers give their cause a veneer of mischievous ...”

“... low life – and is tough to render into English. The various versions around are very different (Robert Chandler reprints William Edgerton’s). Translators have to give the same attention to minutiae as those metallurgists of Tula, while also communing with the writer and the work. Polizzotti is also part-cryptographer, Oulipian in tendency if not a member ...”

“... two people sew alike.”’ There were never any issues with the spacesuits themselves. Robert Rauschenberg, who had a house in Florida, was invited to watch Apollo 11’s launch. He got to see the Saturn V the night before lift-off, its surface covered in ice because of the extreme cold of the liquid gases inside. ‘It turned out to be the most ...”

“... differently.’Analogy – Nero for George I, say, or the Roman imperial enforcer Sejanus for Sir Robert Walpole – was one way of speaking in order to be understood differently. Others were allusion, ellipsis, circumlocution, irony (including mock forms such as mock epideixis, elaborately praising something unpraiseworthy so as to undermine it) and ...”

“... Such a shift would face hostility from many in the party, though its more eccentric elements, like Robert Halfon, have already praised Johnson for establishing a ‘moderate social democratic state’. Keynesians exist on the right as well as the left.There are few precedents for the political consequences of pandemic: the last, a century ago, arrived well ...”

“... There hasn’t been so dashing a male fantasy figure, both footloose and dependable, since Robert Kincaid in The Bridges of Madison County. When not working in war zones, he takes children on wilderness trips and encourages them to practise ‘loss-proofing’. The key to individual survival is prioritising the needs of the group. Not everything is an ...”

“... an actor’s own, that one feels with Cagney and Bogart and Stanwyck; let alone, as with Robert Mitchum, a dangerous allure, or, as with Gloria Grahame, an unbetrayable charm that makes her stand out in any crowd. Yet between 1938 and 1962, he played comic and serious parts with a versatility, a variety of lights and shades that puts him easily in ...”

“... dark pocket at the outer edge the future king of England lowered his eyes to shake the hand of Robert Mugabe. We live in cultish times – not to say, occultist ones – in which it seems not unreasonable for people, en masse, to weep in the streets for public figures they previously cared little about. Pope John Paul II was pretty much like that ...”

“... when the problem becomes interesting, sets it aside – a bad habit he shares with his mentor Robert Nozick.1 Feldman writes, for example: It is appropriate for us to favour – not to impose – certain substantive constitutional outcomes, particularly those that guarantee equal treatment of all Iraqis, regardless of sex, religion and so forth. But the ...”