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“... Angola. One of them was Mozambique. In 1963, Eduardo Mondlane, the leader of Frelimo, approached Robert Kennedy in the hope of securing funding. Kennedy was impressed with Mondlane and offered him $60,000 through the Ford Foundation, which, as Williams points out, was closely linked to the CIA. This didn’t sit well with the Soviets, who were supporting ...”

“... recall, he was full of exhortations about art and entertainment and stories about his best friend, Robert Redford, who had starred in his latest film. His second home, he told me, was in Utah, near Redford’s. He got there by aeroplane, his own, of course, which he also piloted. ‘I’m confident we’re going to have something good,’ he said at the end of ...”

“... history, and its politics are not what you might expect. Last time I was in Colombia I carried Robert Dahl’s Democracy and its Critics: a great help in listing questions about this old and battered democracy, if democracy is what the answers to his questions prove it to be.* ‘Old’? Competitive elections have been held in Colombia, on and off, at ...”

“... in war movies.) Other readers will think (appropriately, too) of moralised adventure novels, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s; of comics, with their arrangements of panels and captions; and of photography. Freddy begins the poem by showing us snapshots, tokens of the domestic life he spends most of the poem longing for: That was sausage day on our farm outside ...”

“... whole European tradition. It suits me fine if that’s all down the drain.’ This happens to be Frank Judd speaking in the late 1960s, but all that distinguishes it from Futurist manifestos of fifty years before is its tone of lumpen disgruntlement. Allen Ginsberg, quoted in one of Butler’s epigraphs, says: ‘there is nothing to be learned from history ...”

“... to the Freeze generation. The names he mentions, especially Josef Beuys and Bruce Nauman, but also Robert Gober, Ashley Bickerton and Jeff Koons, certainly make sense when we look at much of the work on show in Sensation – although, naturally enough, everything that the Young British Artists (more affectionately known as YBAs) absorbed has been given a ...”

“... The impression is rather like that which James himself registered after reading a selection of Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions … one smells the thing unprinted.’ James clearly matters to Tóibín more than any other novelist does, and The Master is probably his most self-scrutinising work. But you can see how ...”

“... lasted because they have psychological depth. Two other front-rank directors who favoured him were Frank Capra and John Ford: Capra served Stewart extremely well and was more than reciprocally rewarded three times, in You Can’t Take It with You, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. Ford called on him for a pair of late films. In Two Rode ...”

“... 1920); Wine and the Wine Lands of the World, With Some Account of Places Visited by Frank Hedges Butler (New York, 1926). His biographers seem to have missed an accompanying volume, a sort of coda: Hope and Help for the Alcoholic by Harold Lovell, published in New York in ...”

“... Walter Gropius and Hans Scharoun switched overnight to a technophile language borrowed from Frank Lloyd Wright, De Stijl and Soviet Constructivism. As an avant-garde, Expressionism had been dead for a decade when the Nazis came to power; if it persisted after 1924, it did so in the neo-Hanseatic brickwork of the likes of Dominikus Böhm and Fritz ...”

“... script realised in film, the skiing drama Downhill Racer, directed by Michael Ritchie and starring Robert Redford. Solo Faces is the story of a rock-climbing drifter and his friend and rival and their pursuit of glory through heroic feats on the mountain. In the earlier A Sport and a Pastime, the quarry, the struggled for peak, is perfect sexual love, though ...”

“... don’t fight – enlightenment. This strange Carlylean vision (wonderfully echoed much later by Frank McGuinness’s play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme) met with as much incomprehension south of the new border as across the Irish Sea; one Fianna Fáil TD suggested in the Dail during 1938 ‘storing up sufficient poison gas’ on the ...”

“... I do much more in Sedaris than quote Sedaris, much more than simply ‘rhapsodise’ (to quote Frank Lentricchia). I analyse the man. I synthesise him. I provide what both Marxists and Freudians call ‘symptomatic readings’. But beyond that, beyond what all literary critics (including Lentricchia) are supposed to do, I – well, let me quote Winton ...”

“... make an uncertain comment when the surrounding water shines. The birds evoked in her elegy for Robert Lowell, ‘North Haven’, have no trouble performing their elegiac function: The Goldfinches are back, or others like them, and the White-throated Sparrow’s five-note song, pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes. More distracting is the ...”

“... a little aloof (‘a kind of hidden stranger among his New York intellectual peers’, Robert Alter very perceptively said of him, in a slightly different context), was prepared to write the story of his generation. When he had lived long enough and seen enough, when the fates of his contemporaries had played themselves out enough, it fell to Kazin ...”