“... for each poet, but they are little help: a poem by Sandro Penna (1906-77) translated by Blake Robinson on page 66 seems close to some lines by Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) translated by Marcus Perryman and Peter Robinson on page 38: but is there really an echo? If so, which way does it run? And is it in the originals ...”

“... of ‘likely’ journalists. Wright was, in the immortal words of his former colleague Neville Robinson, an ‘ignorant shit’. So it was perfectly possible for him and his colleagues to spread among gullible journalists the ‘fact’ that half the Cabinet were secret Communists, or that Healey and Benn had jointly written a pamphlet calling for more ...”

“... the policy editor of Newsnight, Chris Cook, used to be an adviser to David Willetts; or that Nick Robinson, shortly to replace James Naughtie on Today, was once president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. Doubtless most of the time these men do a bang-up job, suspending their personal beliefs in the service of professional integrity. Nor, in ...”

“... Afrikaans genres such as the plaasroman (‘farm-novel’), or the founding authority of Robinson Crusoe, or the bankrupt ideals of the epistolary form, Coetzee’s books set out to provincialise the novel by taking on its pretensions and conventions in a spirit of Erasmian (and Joycean) jocoseriousness. That this is not an emptying gesture of ...”

“... continent, but a place so bare and sterile he called it Desolation Island. The name provides Jean-Paul Kauffmann with the title of the second of his travel books to be translated into English. The first, The Dark Room at Longwood, recorded a visit to St Helena (‘the middle of nowhere’), the scene of Napoleon’s final exile and death. Voyage to Desolation ...”

“... among a cluster of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s sculptures. Patrick Keiller’s 2012 installation The Robinson Institute (which also involved the filmmaker trawling the Tate archives) supplies several apposite works, among them Leonard Rosoman’s 1942 painting Bomb Falling into Water. In the press release for Phantom Ride, Starling quotes Foucault’s claim that ...”

“... apparently claimed £2000 to install a drainage pipe under his tennis court. As the BBC’s Nick Robinson remarked, ‘the political class has lost control of this story. No one knows where it’s going.’ 11 May. To Westminster. Entire place traumatised. No one talking about anything else. The Speaker gave a right bollocking to Kate Hoey and Norman Baker ...”

“... industry were structural and originated in the Industrial Revolution itself. This was a Heath Robinson affair, with laissez-faire giving rise to a ramshackle form of capitalism swiftly overtaken by other countries. So much for self-help! From this angle, Barnett is no Thatcherite: he does not suppose that a return to laissez-faire in 1945 would have ...”

“... been available in print from the time of the great 18th-century landscape gardeners and on through Robinson and Jekyll right up to Christopher Lloyd and Beth Chatto. The highest achievement in gardening, even when plots are small, has always been seen as the creation of a picture. Gardens in which plants are grown for food, medicine or animal feed have their ...”

“... and periodically subject to extreme physical abuse, the Marlowe of the novels, unlike Edward G. Robinson’s insurance investigator in Double Indemnity, is trapped in the dark underside of American life and never acquires the insurance man’s protective armour, his forceful, single-minded menace. But whereas in Woman in the Window Lang directed ...”

“... of Christ that the Pharisees (but not the Sadducees) became believers in personal immortality, St Paul being their most famous Christian convert. Casey admires the ‘unflinching realism’ of Sheol, precisely because it is ‘the fate we could least hope for’, and thus places the human emphasis on life in this world. I think that what he likes about ...”

“... terms than ‘happy’ or ‘exciting’ to describe his culinary experiences or suggestions. Paul Levy, another American, who writes on food in the Observer and elsewhere, is a very different animal. I cannot see him sitting down like Olney and sorting a heap of garden peas into two categories, large and small. He has enthusiasm rather than ...”

“... influence, was never on such close terms with Sartre as he claimed. She says the same about Paul Victor, Sartre’s last collaborator, with whom he was working on important projects in the months before his death. Georges Michel, a communist watchmaker who wrote plays and, through them, became linked with Sartre and Les Temps Modernes, also condemns ...”

“... The success​ of Paul Harding’s first novel, Tinkers (2009), is the kind of good luck story worth passing on to any dispirited author. When Cold Water Flat, the band he drummed with in the 1990s, broke up after touring the US and Europe, he studied creative writing at the University of Iowa, under the tutelage of (among others) Marilynne Robinson ...”

“... the insular world of SF could give, but recognition from outside kept growing, especially after Paul Williams’s 1975 profile in Rolling Stone. Dick’s final years – less prolific but by no means sterile – brought attempts to explain ‘2-3-74’, in essays, in the more careful prose of the last novels and in the mammoth, unpublishable ...”