“... collections that have recently appeared in paperback, Martin Amis’s The War against Cliché and Frank Kermode’s Pleasing Myself. That’s a tough poker table to ask anyone to sit at, and it’s impressive that some of Hitchens’s best pieces, or at least some of his best paragraphs, don’t seem out of place. It’s true that he is quite often doing ...”

“... to reinvent himself with every press interview) and those of his friend, the conductor and writer Robert Craft, who has passed off much of his own prose as the composer’s, and whose custodianship of the Stravinsky legacy Walsh regards as dubious. Then there is the mystifying role of Russia, where the Stravinsky archives were so long inaccessible, and whose ...”

“... Poems (1932), Reconstruction (1933) – as Georgian, countryside-centred and influenced by Robert Bridges, changing swiftly to Auden’s ‘manifesto manner’ for Difficult Morning (also 1933). I am not sure about this, especially the implicit conflict between country and town: Swingler always seems to inhabit either with ease. Certainly, he inclined ...”

“... of Stalingrad. Shtrum has a close circle of scientist friends, with whom he has slightly too frank conversations which he later regrets, and there is a question about whether some of his circle are provocateurs or informers; but when he does get into trouble it is because the state is beginning its turn to anti-semitism. Shtrum has made a theoretical ...”

“... he sat through the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta, Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanité and seven films by Robert Bresson. It was the summer I learned the word ‘austere’.My taste, or at least my appetite, was indiscriminate. As Pauline Kael wrote in 1969, ‘when you’re young the odds are very good that you’ll find something to enjoy in almost any ...”

“... to regain control of barricaded republican areas. Much to the chagrin of the British commander, Robert Ford, the IRA was thus enabled to fight another day – and a bloodbath was avoided. During the early years of the conflict the main tendency of this contact switched from operational discussions to high-level engagement aimed at a settlement.The first ...”

“... less) followed by two lines of five stressed syllables each.’ Far better judges than I, such as Frank Kermode and Stephen Spender, have admired these books; and Wystan Auden and Leonard Woolf are said to have spoken well of them. Certainly he saw himself as the heir to Virginia Woolf and his novels were written for those who enjoy the long conundrums of ...”

“... footnotes, that this ‘critic, biographer and man of letters’, born in 1849, was knighted. Frank Schuster (1840-1928), ‘wealthy musiclover and giver of parties’, was still giving parties, and Sassoon spends a great deal of time in his radiance or under his shadow, making the most of the lavish facilities offered but carping to his diary. Butlers ...”

“... visions any less real. The Mars Society very nearly fell apart at its first convention over the frank opinions of Robert Zubrin, a scientist who in 1990 had come up with an ingenious engineering solution to the problems of getting people to Mars. The plan, which he called ‘Mars Direct’, was to deploy recycled space ...”

“... different, but the unself-conscious way with which Zagajewski handles this ‘I’ brings to mind Frank O’Hara. Certainly, it wouldn’t be easy to say who is the more charming, and charm is very much the issue. The difference is that in O’Hara the ‘I’ (as in ‘I do this, I do that’) is the repository of all charm: the poems are, in Norman ...”

“... or legitimise increasingly strident assertions of immutable racial hierarchy. The Scottish surgeon Robert Knox, who claimed in Races of Men (1850) that ‘race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word civilisation depends upon it,’ completed his medical training in Paris in the 1820s. So did Josiah Clark Nott, a surgeon from South Carolina, who ...”

“... coulisses of Argentine politics, and can fairly be called a participant as well as a commentator. Robert Cox of the Buenos Aires Herald, who writes with the authority of a fellow editor whose support for Timerman never wavered, says that ‘La Opinion gave lukewarm support for human rights and ... maintained weathervane policies according to the views of ...”

“... system of proportion to which all in his office alluded but no one could explain. When Robert Byron wrote his fine articles for Country Life in 1931 commemorating the achievement at New Delhi he noted that the meeting of classicism and the Orient was ‘a fusion, not of historical reminiscences, but of two schools of architectural thought. The ...”

“... art experienced a similar boost with controversies over NEA funding of edgy artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. Might the arts and the humanities be more efficacious than we thought, if not as dangerous as they thought? The increased attention also prompted several shootings-in-the-foot, as some young academics flaunted the new ...”

“... the more lugubrious, latter-day stand-up comedians, such as Bill Murray or Jerry Seinfeld, or even Robert De Niro’s funny-unfunny, mother-haunted Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy. Lonoff himself is a wonderfully comic creation, morose and unforthcoming yet vividly alive on the page. At the close of the book his long-suffering wife walks out (‘I’m ...”