“... a theme taken up from an earlier passage on Chatwin’s troubled and condescending essay about Robert LouisStevenson in the TLS, which Susannah Clapp calls ‘a complicated piece of self-examination and self-dislike’. Identification was a dangerous area for Chatwin. It became disastrous when he thought he saw a ...”

“... creative urge, at its most interesting when most devious. He was certainly a double man. (Robert LouisStevenson had perceptively commented on ‘the note of ambiguity and deceit’ which already ‘brooded over’ Taken from the Enemy.) And a more than Edwardian richness, as well as ambiguity, broods over ...”

“... later reflected, that he had had an experienced mentor to call on for advice – someone such as Robert LouisStevenson, who ‘had always seemed to me “one of the family”’. Greene was distantly related to RLS through his mother’s cousin. ‘Names which appeared in his Collected Letters were photographs in our ...”

“... not astoundThe virtuous mind.Indeed I also find myself reflecting rather sadly about a couplet of Robert LouisStevenson. It is what has been so often attacked in later years as child-cult, the literary man pretending to be a child to make himself look sweet: but I think the people who attacked this didn’t recognise ...”

“... tries to rise to as a correspondent, giving exquisite elegies for old friends like Mrs Kemble and Robert LouisStevenson; even the noble, scrupulous and harrowing account of his loved sister’s last days and hours is improved by an altered phrase. Some things probably came near to defeating him, though he records them ...”

“... to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert LouisStevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years after James’s death, his family in the United States was concerned about his ...”

“... have some answers) by writing. At first she reads books by men. Graham Greene, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert LouisStevenson, ‘that man who wrote Heart of Darkness, whose name escapes me’.I hardly ever saw so much as a glimpse of myself in any of their books and I didn’t care to. I didn’t want to exist in books. I ...”

“... reference-points have always been overwhelmingly literary. Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf and Robert LouisStevenson appear in the first, short, paragraph of this book, and Auden, James and Flaubert have all made their appearance before the end of the second page. Re-reading The Uses of Literacy now, one notices ...”

“... house in Cheshire and his mind would all his life pullulate – like that of his mother’s cousin Robert LouisStevenson – in a ‘nursery-sickroom atmosphere’. His father, a captain in the York and Lancasters, was killed at Ypres in May 1915. His maternal grandmother, Emily, was ‘a great psychosomatic ...”

“... of ‘savages beneath our white skins’ exhilarated him. He preferred H. Rider Haggard and Robert LouisStevenson to Henry James, because their romances seemed to have a primitive gusto. Although Lang co-wrote a fantasy novel with Haggard, his most effective literary use of anthropology came in the form of The ...”

“... her Catriona; would that be all right by me? I was very happy about it. We were both admirers of Robert LouisStevenson. Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.Like all my contemporaries, in those first years ...”

“... be the Shelley ménage – in a book that also explores his biographical ‘intimacy’ with Robert LouisStevenson, Gérard de Nerval and Mary Shelley’s remarkable mother Mary Wollstonecraft – that occasions the reflection. There is something about ‘the Shelley circle’, and particularly its bizarre life ...”

“... but, she stated, this was all false. Nothing of this type had ever occurred. The interviewer, Robert Kee, did not probe this statement at all. Instead he told Mrs Gandhi that she had proved many times over her right to be called a democrat. So literature can, and perhaps must, give the lie to official facts. But is this a proper function of those of us ...”

“... measure. Reading these pages, one often registers the force of the figure splendidly described by Robert LouisStevenson: ‘a splenetic, eager, tasteful, unjust man, filled with gusto and revolt’. This Hazlitt is very much the journalistic creature: the barnstorming, argufying man, working frantically to meet ...”

“... and its urgency (perhaps neither of them especially Bishop-like qualities anyway), and the Robert LouisStevenson or Hans Christian Andersen idea, now gone mousy and a little folksy, fails to survive.A Bishop poem (watch it closely) goes on looking long after one thinks it should have looked away – from having ...”