“... asks how long she’s been writing poems: ‘I made no verse – but one or two – until this winter – Sir –’. (She had written hundreds.) He asks if she’s read Whitman and she plays dumb: ‘I never read his Book – but was told that he was disgraceful –’. (If she hadn’t read Leaves of Grass in full, she’d certainly encountered ...”

“... thinking a thatched roof was the height of exotic. Everything changed for me with the discovery of Robert Burns: those torn-up fields out there were his fields, those bulldozed farms as old as his words, both old and new to me then. Burns was ever a slave to the farming business: he is the patron saint of struggling farmers and poor soil. But in actual ...”

“... cordon of lawyers and friends, a huge, seemingly ever expanding mob – ‘fantastic, in the misty winter night’ – greeted him with a torrent of boos and catcalls. Without the personal intervention of the préfet de police, he would undoubtedly have been knocked to the ground. His carriage left at top speed, pursued by the death cries of the rabble ...”

“... feel like ‘living on a demolition site’. In his 2011 preface to the novel, Carter’s friend Robert Coover quotes from one of her letters on the important point to grasp about her aspirations for her fiction, from Heroes and Villains on. She wanted, Coover writes, ‘a language that insisted upon itself as subject, “a fiction that takes full cognisance ...”

“... extricate place from nation’, she is gratified to find herself standing on the spot where Robert Emmet was hanged in 1803. The psychological basis of her selective vision of Irishness could not be more plainly set forth. Once Boland was settled in Dublin, reading filled in her sense of an Ireland which she did not ‘possess’. But in her ...”

“... His older twin, Jesse Garon, was stillborn. (There was ugly gossip later that the doctor, William Robert Hunt, might have had a drink; that he might have saved Jesse if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the surprise appearance of a second child. But the Presleys were satisfied with his work and Dr Hunt received his standard $15 payment from the county.) In ...”

“... Ado about Nothing (which the accountant calls ‘Benidicte and Betteris’), plus The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Othello and probably the two Henry IV plays (listed as ‘The Hotspurr’ and ‘Falstaff’). Also listed are four plays by Fletcher, all collaborations with Francis Beaumont, including two performances of Philaster. The dates of the ...”

“... us, ‘begun the routine of fast reviewing (five pieces for the Criterion alone in autumn and winter 1932).’ ‘Even at this embryonic stage of his career,’ Sutherland continues, ‘he provoked intense envy and malice in fellow writers to whom his own feelings were entirely benign.’ The sense that Sutherland is being a bit too collusive with ...”

“... Merchants and Revolution, dedicated to Stone, comprehensively overturns that judgment. Its author, Robert Brenner, belongs to that rare group of historians who have given their name to a whole literature – the ‘Brenner Debate’ on the origins of agrarian capitalism in Europe recalling the ‘Pirenne Thesis’ of old. His new book, in which the name of ...”

“... full murder mode. Historical information and interpretation, based largely on Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews, have also been added. The 2503 photographs themselves: these have been reproduced from identity cards and gravestones, from formal studio portraits and intimate snapshots, from school, camp and playground groups, from ...”

“... poems makes a reader feel that he can only approve the poet’s judgment in not collecting them; Robert Conquest plunges the reader into an obscure background involving reciprocal limericks which were no doubt funny at the time but which are not (unlike those Monteith quotes) funny enough now. In the absence of any more exact sense of subject and form, these ...”

“... It’s hard to ignore the fact that Putin sent in the troops after the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics (during which Xi said China’s partnership with Russia has ‘no limit’), in contrast to the attack on Georgia in 2008, which coincided with the opening of the Summer Olympics in Beijing. That Olympics was referred to as ‘China’s coming out ...”

“... decided he didn’t like standing out in the cold? His first biographer (and former student), Robert Emmons, insisted that ‘SICKERT IS ONE OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS’ on the grounds that, though not an original member, he was ‘so closely allied to them both in method and sentiment, as to take his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost ...”

“... dates. The first plans for the cemetery were drawn up in 1920 and finalised two years later by Sir Robert Lorimer, an architect inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement and Scottish baronial architecture – nostalgia to soothe the pain of modernity. Like most such cemeteries, it is overlooked by a Cross of Sacrifice – an elongated cross usually set on an ...”

“... tune of about £650,000. Between Agnew’s place and Sandringham is Houghton Hall, family seat of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, now the home of David, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, Lord Great Chamberlain and beneficiary of £260,000 in subsidies. The land Agnew’s house stands on was part, until relatively recently, of Marquess ...”