“... in echoes under Bellow’s powerful prose. The rhetoric of multiplicity is other than American (Robert Burton probably invented it for English prose) but both Bellow and McBain are probably hearing some rhythm from Whitman’s sometimes tedious but more often breathtaking echt American anaphoras, constructed to coast us as in a spaceship across an otherwise ...”

“... candidacies in the US as is widely believed, and the main ones we know about – those involving Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas – were rightly controversial. US Federal judges have in the main drawn a degree of comfort from their confirmation hearings, feeling that it has given them a measure of democratic legitimacy in relation to their subsequent ...”

“... manners.Except that now, telling the story, I can’t be sure that it was Ronald Colman and not Robert Donat, who was certainly more likely to be in Leeds and indeed in England and who was known to be shy (and, as Mam said, ‘a martyr to asthma’) and therefore more likely to bolt from the shop.Cherished and admired as a local boy was Eric Portman, who ...”

“... to cut costs in an industry that had grown used to healthy sales and advertising revenues.’ Robert Maxwell had launched the European in 1990 with the idea of producing Europe’s ‘first national newspaper’. But the tone of its coverage changed after the Barclays took over, and in 1998 the managing editor, Peter Millar, resigned, complaining that the ...”

“... which for their combination of learning and penetration excel even those of his master, Ernst Robert Curtius – there is nothing said which he was not equally ready to say, mutatis mutandis, about Montale. He studied the poetry of the past on the assumption that in the present there could be great poets too. For Contini history is now and now is ...”

“... up to the New Abbey. In its surrounds were a tumulus where the ancient Scots kings, including Robert the Bruce, had had their bones interred. And Macbeth himself? Around those grounds were numerous Celtic crosses, planted like miniature saplings, most of them only replicas of destroyed originals. The shape of the Celtic cross was remarkably endearing to ...”

“... politics we got the PUP and the UDP. They have been joined by the barrister-turned-politician, Robert McCartney who, along with Conor Cruise O’Brien, founded the UKUP (that rogue ‘K’ is for ‘Kingdom’), to oppose further UUP sell-outs and the mayhem of a united Ireland. In last month’s Assembly elections there were also candidates who variously ...”

“... not coincidentally, Margery Kempe is the title and subject of an extraordinary new gay novel by Robert Glück). Going even farther back we could mention Saint Augustine’s Confessions. The autobiographical urge, from its very beginnings, has been the site where two codes – the realistic and the spiritual – have crossed. If Schopenhauer placed biography ...”

“... extricate place from nation’, she is gratified to find herself standing on the spot where Robert Emmet was hanged in 1803. The psychological basis of her selective vision of Irishness could not be more plainly set forth. Once Boland was settled in Dublin, reading filled in her sense of an Ireland which she did not ‘possess’. But in her ...”

“... who had let it be understood that he was one of those hard-riding gentlemen like Major Robert Gregory, celebrated by Yeats for riding a race without a bit. He no sooner mounted his small beast than it reared and slowly bolted, dumping him onto the desert. Later I was told that this accident was more likely to happen to an experienced rider than to ...”

“... included paintings by Ernst and poems by the American Modernist Hart Crane, the French Surrealists Robert Desnos and Philippe Soupault and the German Expressionist Georg Trakl (in translations from French and German by Eugene Jolas). A decade later, the last issue was still churning out Work in Progress, now alongside work by Hans Arp, Beckett, Breton, Kafka ...”

“... anxiety: was she having an affair after all? In the eyes of American liberal intellectuals such as Robert Silvers, Encounter had ‘one obvious defect. It was inherently uncritical of the American situation.’ For the most part, it dealt gently, if at all, with topics such as race and Vietnam. When in 1963 Conor Cruise O’Brien published the first of his ...”

“... enjoins everyone to refrain from dogmatism. Though unable to refrain from a hefty side-swipe at Robert Kagan’s Martians, Soros generally abides by his own rules. Thus a liberal concept of human nature is saved, albeit by a curious exaltation of indeterminacy. In his introduction, Todd says that the most disturbing thing about the present situation is ...”

“... of her career: the Autodidact of all Autodidacts. The quizzing was relentless. Had I read Robert Walser? (Ooooh errrg blush, ahem, little cough, um: No, I’m ashamed to say . . .) Had I read Thomas Bernhard? (Yes! – Yes, I have! ‘Wittgenstein’s Nephew’! Yay! Yippee! Wow! Phew! – dodged the bullet that time!) It seemed, for a while at ...”

“... victims of Western standards of humanity.’ Editing the piece for the New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers objected to the unqualified critique of Western capitalism: ‘Won’t you keep in mind the Western reader who might not want to cross the slag heaps with you?’ (She felt he had edited the piece into a ‘mild, unchallenging plea’.) With its ...”