“... Barry was an eccentric, seen ‘in his worst (that is to say, his maddest) days’, according to Robert Southey, in a dirt and paint-encrusted green baize coat with a tired old wig. But a bequest was the best hope for the two women, whose other male relatives had proven unreliable. Margaret’s brother, John, apprenticed ...”

“... seems to have sat and read in something like an octagonal closet, nine feet across and painted green and white, with eight desks and drawers for books. By removing the drawers he could take the books with him from residence to residence, slotting them into other similar reading closets. Most early library rooms have been lost, but there are some jewel-like ...”

“... prizes the Oedipus complex. It would, wouldn’t it? Blake’s cultivation of his brother Robert was, apparently, ‘his most sustained and successful piece of Oedipal insubordination’, a means of ‘displacing his parents – particularly his father’. Aren’t the poems full of oppressive fathers, from Tiriel to Nobodaddy? ‘William’s poems ...”

“... route, Peter Redgrove has arrived back at a very ancient place: or at any rate, a place that Robert Graves unearthed in The White Goddess and would have us believe is ancient. Graves is probably right: but it is best to approach enchanted ground, as he himself does, doubly armed, with red thread around a rowan twig and a pinch of scepticism. What is ...”

“... wrote of a Greek doctor who gazed wonderingly at Disraeli’s garb of red shirt, silver buttons, green pantaloons, jacket festooned with ribbons, Turkish slippers, and then asked: ‘Questo vestito Inglese o di fantasia?’ To this there came a reply which Monypenny describes as ‘oracular’, but which seems to me richly appropriate to the story as a ...”

“... Fled backward with a gimlet in its heart To see the two youths swimming hand in hand Through green eternity. O swept overboard Not could the thirty-foot jaws them part, or the flouncing skirts that swept them over Separate what death pronounced was love. It is a most subtle use of archaism, in diction, properties and propriety – lamentation and ...”

“... sight of something by the shore of the lake: turtles waddling in to end the story in the manner of Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ or Tobias Wolff’s ‘Poaching’: ‘They watch those turtles on their slow march and behold those ancient creatures, shell-backed and the colour of time, as they lower themselves, turtle upon turtle, disappearing into the ...”

“... of Fountain’s long apprenticeship is that his 1970s-vintage literary models – among them Robert Stone, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer in Vietnam-era reportage mode – turned out to be pretty useful for a writer hitting his stride at the start of the 21st century. His main adjustments concern mood. For the pill-popping nerviness of Didion and ...”

“... than the dress itself suggests.By now Nicholson had begun on the still lifes. The Lustre Bowl with Green Peas and The Lowestoft Bowl (both 1911) are two of the most beautiful. Having been commissioned before the war to create a decorative scheme for the Paris apartment of the author Edward Knoblock, Nicholson set up a studio there and painted Studio Still Life ...”

“... of curiosity: historical, technical, geographical. The result falls short of the masterpiece that Robert Penn Warren hails on the jacket. It needs a bigger and better-stocked mind to carry the reader from one individually satisfying sketch to another over such a long span. But for a writer’s first published book it is a formidable achievement, combining the ...”

“... of, the Times on seven other pages. The Sunday Times features on six pages. The Times columnist Robert Harris gets two entries compared to Germaine Greer’s one, Gandhi’s one, or Mandela’s one. Noam Chomsky: nil. E.P Thompson: nil. The Times columnist Bernard Levin: two. Levin deserves a special mention. In the Times in May 1996, he implied that ...”

“... are 101 of them and their total length is considerably less than 1000 lines), he recalls Robert Graves’s suggestion that the long poem may be ‘nothing more than a poet’s attempt at greatness, at becoming “major” ’. While, on the one hand, Armitage asserts that ‘today, it is still the short poem that stays in the mind as ...”

“... onto the tarmac, sporting the colours of Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and waving green branches – a symbol of grief, cleansing and continuity in Luo culture. It took several hours for the coffin to make the short journey to parliament, as thousands walked alongside the motorcade. The crowds were so large that the public viewing was moved ...”

“... a Wet Wipe, a dog came padding down the opposite sidewalk before slowing to a halt outside the green house at 83 Beals Street, the house where John Kennedy was born. The windows on the ground floor had curtains of Irish lace. ‘That dog has no right to be walking over there,’ said the lady. The young man smiled and snapped his fingers. ‘Dog got no ...”

“... to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge ...”