“... back story, a baleful one, sheds some light here, both on the vicissitudes of the career and the frank titillations of style. Like other taboo-breaking writers – D.H. Lawrence and Sylvia Plath come to mind – Hutchins seems to have written for some fairly unpleasant emotional reasons, and the wish to mortify her nearest and dearest was no doubt among ...”

“... the character of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer with great assurance. And, more recently, Robert Rhodes James discovered the roots of Anthony Eden’s vulnerability better than any contemporary profile-writer. This is not the privilege of hindsight. Newspaper editors simply do not have high enough standards. They should commission profiles from our ...”

“... his national service in Puerto Rico. The manuscript was submitted to Simon and Schuster, where Robert Gottlieb, after dickering for two years, eventually turned it down in 1966. By 1969 Toole was an English instructor at Dominican University, working in his spare time on his PhD. A modest academic career seemed likely. But Toole began to behave in a ...”

“... sky behind him, a painting long believed to be a portrait of Dr Johnson’s beloved black servant, Frank Barber. Houdon’s radiant patinated plaster head of a black woman of 1781, probably made in connection with a fountain group for an aristocrat’s garden, is another. Above all, there is the Portrait d’une Négresse exhibited at the Paris salon in 1800 ...”

“... well, since the tale is in substance almost unbearably violent and cruel, a manifestation of what Robert Frost calls ‘design of darkness to appal’. The central figure, Yoshihide, is a painter, a wholly disagreeable man who loves only two things: his art and his daughter. The daughter is a Lady-in-Waiting to the Grand Lord of Horikawa, whose particular ...”

“... why Austen readers could find her thoroughly disturbing. Jane Austen and her contemporaries had a frank curiosity about one another’s personalities and lives which often at the time came under fire as vulgar prying. A passion for gossip at all levels made the early 19th century an age of biography, and flowed into other literary forms in abundance, taking ...”

“... of the time, complementing in that respect the massive literary biographies of Grossman and Frank. Inside the novels the characters have a genius for depriving all other literature and literary figures of what one of them calls zhivaya zhizn (‘living life’): the notorious instance is the treatment by the narrator of Karmazinov/Turgenev in The ...”

“... American ideology. In ‘The Purposes of American Power’ (Foreign Affairs, Winter 1980-81), Robert Tucker claims to be steering a new course between proponents of ‘resurgent America’ and ‘isolationism’. Yet for the Persian Gulf and Central America he proposes a policy of frank interventionism, since, he ...”

“... does not die. It is fascinating to notice that when the Congress for Cultural Freedom dispatched Robert Lowell to South America he refused to tell lies and play the part of CIA Virgil. Instead he freaked, sent telegrams to the Pope on the theme of ‘America as the Roman Empire’, insulted every general he met, tried to climb all the equestrian statues in ...”

“... debate in academic and cultural life in America. Her subjects range from the attempts to suppress Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs (the famous print of Mapplethorpe with a whip inserted into his anus is reproduced in evidence) to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, to the way the exposé of Paul de Man’s early anti-Semitic writings has been used to ...”

“... and overwritings which, while visually creating a symbol of aesthetic tussle not unlike a Frank Auerbach drawing and securing the myth of Beethoven as a heroically patient grappler with crude ideas, in strictly musical terms often amount to a radical recasting of the music, a decisive continuation of composition at ‘fair copy’ or autograph ...”

“... argument on a military principle known as ‘unlawful command influence’, the defence attorney, Frank Spinner, asked the judge to dismiss the case. With no jurors present, Spinner introduced a witness who testified that he had overheard a conversation on the base which suggested unlawful command influence on the part of Fort Carson’s commanding ...”

“... and post-religious recovery, ranging from The Nemesis of Faith (1849) by his disciple and too frank biographer J.A. Froude to Mary Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888). The German setting and European (and occasionally Asian and African) frame of reference seem to make this a cosmopolitan rather than an English or Scottish ...”

“... even more suburban San Fernando Valley, much was written about Richard Meier’s architecture and Robert Irwin’s gardens. Remarkably little was written about the parking garage, though it’s the first structure you encounter on arriving at the Getty. (Theoretically, you could take a bus there, but this is, after all, a museum in LA up on a bluff above the ...”

“... May 1914, some six months before his late efflorescence into verse at the age of 36, he wrote to Robert Frost of his longing to ‘wring all the necks of my rhetoric – the geese’. He was referring to the over-elaborate style of some of his prose writings, but his first poem, ‘Up in the Wind’, composed on 3 December 1914, opens with a version of the ...”