Search Results

“... Home,’ Mary suggests in Robert Frost’s 1914 poem ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.’ To which her husband, Warren, replies: ‘I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ Home is Marilynne Robinson’s third novel; published four years after Gilead and 27 years after her astonishing debut, Housekeeping, it explores with unsparing precision and the most delicate subtlety the implications of Frost’s rival definitions of the idea of home ...”

“... a history of the Economic Section up to 1961, and the other the first instalment of the diaries of Robert Hall, who was head of the Economic Section from 1947, throw a good deal of light on these questions. Both authors of the history worked in the Section, Alec Cairncross briefly in 1940-41, and again as its head after 1961, and Nita Watts from 1941 to ...”

“... Is Robert Lowell Better than Noel Coward, Howard? W.H. Auden’s little poem has passed into the folk memory without, so far as we know, ever having seen print. The editor in question is Howard Moss, who runs the poetry in the New Yorker ...”

“... to present them in as favourable a light as possible. From this point of view, the diary of Robert Kilroy-Silk is a great disappointment.1 Before embarking on its exploration the reader ought to prepare himself for two shocks. First, there are yet more disclosures about the operations of Militant in Merseyside. In his new book on Labour’s future Eric ...”

“... revenge on Edmund Wilson; the witches of Eastwick (lacking only their Hardwick) have vented about Robert Lowell. To interview all the exes of Philip Rahv would be an undertaking from which the most committed Boswellian might recoil. (Though it’s fascinating to speculate what might have happened if Rahv and Mary McCarthy had made a go of it; a marriage ...”

“... whom the term would have embraced at any later period, but one specific group – the followers of Robert Owen. Like Engels himself, Robert Owen was an unusual figure among the founding fathers of socialism in that he was also a successful capitalist entrepreneur. Born in 1771, the son of a humble Welsh saddler, Owen soared ...”

“... aside the genre known as ‘Imitation’, in which poets like Samuel Johnson, Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell have done such marvellous things. A verse translation may aim to be an independent modern work in its own right. Or, I ought rather to say, this is what some famous and admired translations have in fact been. If you took Pope seriously as to the ...”

“... for Robert Conquest Exotic stimulations! Our passions pulled so loose From anything we might Share with our congeners, Why should we not refuse Their craven fabrications? Conquest (what a name for The emulous and mettled!), How can you think the score Settled by mere good humour? Confess a covert wish for The Orphic, the unfettered ...”

“... Virginia Woolf​ could be cruelly accurate in her assessments of people. On 24 April 1925 Robert Graves visited her unexpectedly and stayed too long. She described him as ‘a nice ingenuous rattle headed young man’, and declared ‘the poor boy is all emphasis protestation and pose.’ By 1925 Graves had good reason to be ‘rattle headed ...”

“... and internment; several are old comrades whom he had believed dead. He is reunited with his friend Robert Hirsch, a legendary fighter who tore about Occupied France in SS uniform rescuing Ludwig and other refugees from internment camps and the pursuing Gestapo. Now Robert is managing a small electrical goods shop. He slowly ...”

“... too, that Bishop’s peculiar methods and achievement were somehow exemplary or corrective. Robert Lowell, also an early enthusiast, addressed Bishop handsomely in a poem of his later years as the ‘unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect’ – again the highest praise, and with an emphasis on her role as touchstone and ...”

“... weekly investigative column. The document was a copy of a pro forma shoplifter’s report from the Robert Simpson Company Ltd, which owns a department store in Toronto. The report was timed at 10.40 a.m. on 18 November 1975, and was in the form of a voluntary statement, as follows: ‘I Jeffrey Howard Archer do state that I took merchandise to the value of ...”

“... was content to return to Hippocrates’s theory of an aetiology from ‘miasmata’ in swamps. Robert Desowitz recounts in some detail the discovery of the malaria pathogen transmitted to humans by the bite of the anopheline mosquito, and provides much fascinating information en route. Polynesia was malaria-free until Europeans brought the scourge in the ...”

“... aposiopesis may be allowed as a structural feature, as when Yeats ends his ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ by claiming that he cannot continue his roll call of Gregory’s friends because ‘a thought/Of that late death took all my heart for speech.’ We may grant Yeats command of that trick and also say that to confront horror with irony calls for ...”

“... and philosopher of skully’, a form of hopscotch played with bottle tops. All this changes when Robert Woolfolk, an older boy ‘from the projects’, starts showing up on Dean Street. Almost immediately, he singles Dylan out: having threatened to steal his money, he makes off with his bicycle. But Dylan has his mother to protect him. Rachel grew up ‘a ...”