“... In the famous phrase about the death of Little Nell, it would require a man with a heart of stone to read these ricordi di amore without bursting into helpless laughter. So let us forget the tear-stained love interest and turn to politics, for the ultimate test of a politician’s reminiscences is whether they assist us in understanding the events which ...”

“... Jamie and knocked her little girl about, Bill moves on to Chicago. (Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is a leitmotif in the narrative.) Reduced to selling her blood, Jamie takes the money her long-suffering sister has wired her and instead of going where she should, to Hershey, never arrived at in this novel, she follows Bill to Chicago. At that city’s ...”

“... Captain acted with such civility that he became Darwin’s ‘beau ideal’ before they left port. Robert McCormick, the ship’s surgeon and ipso facto naturalist, was so put out by the social preference and hindrance to his own efforts to collect that he quit in Rio and shipped home. (The tradesman-status of naval surgeons in the 1830s was notorious.) It was ...”

“... referendum on independence in 2013 and instead moved to hold one in 2014, the 700th anniversary of Robert the Bruce’s victory over the English at the Battle of Bannockburn. Yet until Cameron’s intervention it wasn’t clear that Salmond was leading Scotland towards independence at all. While independence might have been a very long-term goal, he seemed ...”

“... poets especially have been very keen on remembering what they haven’t done. I’m thinking of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ and the unrealised walk in the first part of T.S. Eliot’s first Quartet.Frost says ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood’, and recounts his regret that he ‘could not travel both/And be one traveller’. He looked ...”

“... Vendler to distort major figures helps her discriminate among lesser planets. Her inclusion of Robert Hayden, for example, is bold and welcome. Moreover, her promise to present writers ‘whole’ has more chance of being fulfilled with subsidiary figures. When Eliot judged anthologies less just to major than minor poets, he was, as often, lending his ...”

“... one that washes over you when you see flights advertised for 99p: something just isn’t right. Robert Greenwald’s documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price makes a strong argument about what exactly is not right. It boils down to the question of just how Wal-Mart achieves its control of costs – a word which, in a business context, to a large ...”

“... if I had body odour. According to my old Maudsley handbook Clozapine typically causes about two stone in weight gain. That is about what I put on. It also causes tachycardia and somnolence. Throughout the time I was taking it my pulse was often over a hundred at rest. I went to bed no later than 6.30 p.m. Clozapine can also cause pneumonia and in January ...”

“... contain huge leaps in time, which are intended to illustrate this. Her American readership is like Robert Frost’s: read by every American schoolchild, both have to be rescued from the flag-wavers with strenous reminders of their ‘dark’ seriousness and formal excellence. In Cather’s case, there is also the rich and bedeviling problem of how to frame her ...”

“... where ‘the high pines bend/Seaward in slow acknowledgment of mountain wind’ and a ‘square stone’ table is ‘set with blue figs’. The poem was written in 1954, when Mathews and Saint Phalle were living in the coastal village of Deià in Mallorca. There they had their second child and they asked Robert Graves to ...”

“... self-conscious to be readable (‘beautiful but dumb books as clumsy in their way as the Rozetti stone’ in the punning words of Robert Carlton Brown, a maker of what on the evidence of McGann’s examples must be handmade books of exemplary jokiness). Unreadability, McGann says, can be a virtue. The poems of Emily ...”

“... Treason is not one of these hagiograms. They really talked: David Footman, Nicholas Elliott, Sir Robert Mackenzie, George Carey-Foster, Sir Frederick Warner, agents and diplomats on the security side, and a large anonymous group of Intelligence men from both branches of the service, retired and active. The reason can be guessed at. Boyle’s American ...”

“... she lived in the age of ‘Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven’. I do not believe that the parallels Robert Wallace draws, in Jane Austen and Mozart (1983), between her fictional and his orchestral structures can be sustained in the detail Mr Wallace proposes, but he does indicate how small an opportunity Jane Austen had to know the composers Professor Halperin ...”

“... drawbridge and artificially-ruined keep – an enterprise vividly described not long ago in Robert Martin’s biography of the poet. Decades later, Charles’s nephew, the Poet Laureate, could pay no higher tribute to the late Prince Consort than by dedicating the first several Idylls of the King to his memory as ‘Scarce other than my king’s ideal ...”

“... and ‘in depth’ material from the usual places, using Drudge’s website as a stepping stone. He claims six million hits a month and as many as a million a day when a really hot and edgy story (like ‘Monica II’) is fresh. He has monitored up to three thousand hits in one day from the White House – which has a staff of a thousand. Despite the ...”