“... use of the findings – probably because they would reveal too much about the workings of the CIA. Robert Dallek, Johnson’s biographer, also thinks that internecine Democratic jealousies may have been involved: LBJ’s failure to pursue the lead Demetracopoulos gave Larry O’Brien ‘speaks volumes about his reluctance to help Humphrey defeat Nixon’. But ...”

“... the best in the country, and education – including that offered at a nautical school run by Robert Burns’s friend David Sillar – was counted high. There was suddenly a book shop, Templeton’s in the High Street, and newspapers from London, along with the hot political and literary journals of the day. In a flash, Irvine became a town that was part ...”

“... For God’s sake leave me alone!’ ‘Why the hell should I?’ ‘What’s it to me anyway?’ That sort of unilateral declaration of indifference must be the starting point of nearly all family quarrels, and plenty of political catastrophes as well. ‘Why should I always give way to other people? Am I my brother’s keeper?’ But eventually the question will be turned sarcastically back on you ...”

“... hailed in a copy of La Poussière de soleils as a ‘modern Julius Caesar’ – Proust, Colette, Robert Desnos, Pierre Loti ‘dont on ne doit prononcer le nom qu’à genoux’), self-promoting publicity handouts, details of his extravagant theatrical ventures, press clippings describing his roulotte, a luxury caravan he had custom-built and of which he was ...”

“... 1978. Humphrey Bogart’s momentum, his Jacobean wit, is transformed by the passage of time into Robert Mitchum’s monumental disdain. Mitchum is breathless, sculptural. He moves with extreme reluctance, as if charging an excess tariff for every step. Sallis understands how it’s done, he’s been to the classes. He’s learnt how to assemble the ...”

“... considerations’ or some other mode of standardised comparable worth. He rejects the America of Robert Hutchins’s ‘Great Conversation’ and all such abstract if marketable egalitarianisms. Leavis finds what difference he needs within his own tradition; and the only way to bring him out of that corner is to match him with the fact of another critic, a ...”

“... of vernacular satire – some of it, like the first printing of Piers Plowman made in 1550 by Robert Crowley, and other artisan, plain-Piers complaint, brought out of Lollard-tainted obscurity. King makes a solid rather than a lively read. He is best on Crowley and William Baldwin, perhaps – their activities in the book trade, and their satirical ...”

“... and wrote good verse, wrote some good Christian verse. And in fact his elegy ‘On the death of Mr Robert Levet’ (which is included neither in Davie’s anthology nor in Cecil’s) seems to me a very good Christian poem, not merely because it emerges from a culture professedly Christian, but because – on Davie’s own grounds – it illustrates the parable ...”

“... for their continued authority of speech we must come closer to our own time – to the poetry of Robert Lowell or of Sylvia Plath. There the language of poetry has the same kind of mesmeric power and the same air of constant danger. But it is, of course, danger of a different kind – the danger that boils up from within and makes living for a poet a hazard ...”

“... This sort of anthology is just the right place to happen on Hardy’s ‘The Garden Seat’, Robert Frost’s marvellous little short tale in verse about the buzz saw, a sonnet of Dante admirably translated by Kenneth Koch, Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Giving Potatoes’, Theodore Roethke’s ‘The Meadow Mouse’ or a 12-line poem by James Stephens (author ...”

“... wouldn’t give himself. He always stopped. He wouldn’t quite go over the top,’ Robert Tear thinks, and Michael Tippett speaks wistfully of Britten’s ‘immense possibilities’. Those possibilities were abundantly evident from the start. The young Britten was a musical prodigy who poured out music in an unstaunchable flood, music which ...”

“... it operates a strange amalgam of common law and Continental practice, and just as in 1946 Robert Jackson, who led the US legal team, was incapable of transcending his belief that the American system alone guarantees a fair trial, so in The Hague the American lawyers seem strangely unable to adapt to those elements of Continental practice which have ...”

“... to be sick. She took mothering classes and subscribed to Parents magazine. She had another baby, Robert, took guitar lessons and saw a psychoanalyst, Saul Miller, three times a week. Decades ago, one of Ethel’s previous biographers, Ilene Philipson, interviewed Miller. He told her that Ethel was attracted to analysis because she ‘believed that her ...”

“... subsequent books had been well received, but it was North that really established him: it prompted Robert Lowell to declare him the best Irish poet since Yeats, and he was widely celebrated by the London reviewers, who seemed on the whole untroubled by the suggestion that the Irish might be constitutionally disposed to killing one another. Heaney didn’t ...”

“... also inspired two of the true jewels and masterworks of science fiction’s ‘Golden Age’ – Robert A. Heinlein’s stories ‘By His Bootstraps’ (1941) and ‘All You Zombies’ (1959) – may be less well known. In these stories the protagonist, travelling into the past (and having to do so repeatedly in order to try to correct the damage wreaked by ...”