“... was appalled by Coleridge (‘a mass of richest spices, putrified into a dunghill’), and advised Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett and Alfred Tennyson to give up poetry and write prose instead. Not only his contemporaries fell short. Milton was guilty of unsystematic reasoning (‘It is quite clear that he never studied mathematics very deeply, or political ...”

“... Beat the Devil. He, too, is ruthless and unsmiling, and finding Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Robert Morley cast up on his shores, plans to have them all shot. Bogart, however, discovers the sheikh’s soft spot, a secret passion for Rita Hayworth, and saves their lives by promising the humourless young man an introduction to ‘the peerless Rita’ (the ...”

“... Christianity, but most moved east to the Bekaa Valley. Relics of their presence linger, however. Robert Frangieh, the late president’s son, told me about a Shia shrine near his home in the Christian mountain village of Ehden. Called the Makbara Metwali, the Tomb of the Shia, it honours a Shia saint. Christians, he said, stayed the night there when they ...”

“... But when he finally returned to Russia for a visit in 1962, accompanied by the American conductor Robert Craft, Craft was astonished at the transformation he observed. Suddenly the man he knew, or thought he knew, became someone else: ‘Now I see that half a century of expatriation can be . . . forgotten in a night.’ Stravinsky was anxious to meet ...”

“... and Marvin were sleeping together,’ quoting Mary Frank, the wife of the photographer Robert Frank (with whom he did a phone interview): ‘It was so horrible that it was always unspoken but understood.’ He also quotes the photographer Saul Leiter (whom he interviewed face to face): Diane ‘talked about it. I think she had a conversation with ...”

“... Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol (the future godfather of neoconservatism) and the cultural observer Robert Warshow, whose essays on the movie Western and gangster films would become anthology classics and whose personal mystique resembled James Agee’s without the all-night jags. When Warshow asks Podhoretz out to lunch, ‘I felt as a girl with a secret ...”

“... deception’. Improvising on characters from The Tempest in another great essay, this one about Robert Frost, Auden allocated the first of these kinds of poetry to the spritely Ariel, the second to the worldly Prospero, and suggested that every poet – meaning himself – contained some mixture of the two. But they are evidently two very different sorts of ...”

“... a thick, oily and malodorous fog that made it harder for German gunners to find their targets.As Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and other memoirists of the First World War made clear, there was always a radical division between ‘the line’ and ‘behind the line’. The line meant mud, blood, rats, inedible rations and the continuous, unbearable thunder ...”

“... in the Obama, Bush and Clinton administrations. For hawks, such as the US trade representative Robert Lighthizer and Trump’s favourite economic adviser, Peter Navarro, the question is why the effort to enrol China in the world economy was undertaken in the first place, and who benefited from an experiment that has gone so badly wrong.The crude Trumpian ...”

“... that his guys were all OK. Men like his chief strategist David Axelrod and his press secretary Robert Gibbs, along with his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and economic adviser Larry Summers, both of whom were notoriously abrasive. ‘Knowing them as well as I did, I felt that as much as any of us growing up in America can be free of bias, they passed the ...”

“... as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester Square at noon, the Tube ...”

“... the 1951 film adaptation of Show Boat. When the sheriff arrives to arrest Steve Baker (played by Robert Sterling) for being married to Julie LaVerne (played by Ava Gardner), the leading lady in a riverboat revue who we learn has ‘negro blood’, he pricks her finger, sucks her blood and proclaims that he now has ‘negro blood’ too. In Mississippi, where ...”

“... collaborators (which Camus supported) and the execution of fascist sympathisers such as the writer Robert Brasillach (which he opposed). With the start of the Cold War, the always precarious alliance between the communist and non-communist left was beginning to crumble. Camus was fretting, too, about his native Algeria, ‘pacified’ by the army after a ...”

“... capitalisation required. It was a serious thing, trying to be a writer. My ex-boyfriend, Robert, had just won a national book contest. When I first saw David, he was kneeling next to Robert’s chair, looking up at him. I thought he looked like a little bird waiting to be fed. But David noticed me in a different ...”

“... are never curst but when they are hungry.’Shakespeare took his play from a novella by Robert Greene called Pandosto: or, The Triumph of Time. That subtitle may have been one of the things which mainly interested the dramatist in it, the other being the incestuous plot situation that drives its royal hero to his final suicide: when his lost child ...”