“... When the King’s printer Robert Barker produced a new edition of the King James Bible in 1631, he overlooked three letters from the seventh commandment, producing the startling injunction: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Barker was fined £300, and spent the rest of his life in debtors’ prison, even while his name remained on imprints ...”

“... unusual layout and typography, and for his close association with older poets, especially with Robert Lowell (he co-edited Lowell’s posthumous Collected Poems). Bidart and his poems indeed have all these qualities, but they are not the best reasons to read his poetry. That poetry – especially in his last few books – deserves to be known for the ...”

“... dumpster like pedestrian traffic. Rats poking their noses through holes in the walls. Old rats. Young rats. Baby rats. Thrashy rats. Ugly, dirty scratchy rats. Funny, jumpy cute rats.’ And then there is Robert Sullivan’s delightful and revolting Rats, the most exhaustive, nauseating and pleasurable compendium of rat ...”

“... Nonetheless, he has unearthed some corroborating evidence – including a steamy letter to another young favourite, apparently written while Vaughan was invigilating a school exam – and concludes that the story is broadly true. But this characteristic piece of English hypocrisy is only one element in Tyerman’s demythologising of the school’s ‘greatest ...”

“... many gender nonconformists, some of the disabled and the ailing, many of the very old and the very young, and anyone else who is physically alive but civically lessened. He calls it an inhumanity, all too human, that we regularly visit on our own kind.First in his typology are people who simply vanish. Right away Heller-Roazen demonstrates his range, citing ...”

“... a song from his posthumously released ‘demos’ album Love Is Overtaking Me. It’s as if Neil Young had made not just the lilting Harvest Moon and the frazzled Tonight’s the Night, but also Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’ and Steve Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians into the bargain. What can they possibly have in ...”

“... The estimates for the end of the Thirties ranged from Dallin and Nicolaevsky’s ten million and Robert Conquest’s nine million (the latter figure excluded ‘criminals’) to Wheatcroft’s maximum of four to five million, Jasny’s three and a half million and Timasheff’s two million. Elaborate records in the NKVD archives reveal that about two million ...”

“... of dancing. Altogether the choruses are less richly rendered than they are in the translation by Robert Fagles, but the austerity is deliberate and this whole work is very cool and restrained. It results from an independent approach to Sophocles, and the introduction offers a personal reading of the plays which is both interesting and quite unlike the way ...”

“... eternal cliché – and thus, like all modern art, to have a special appeal, particularly to the young. In times of educational optimism and university expansion, courses in it might expect to be popular, go-ahead. But Trilling, like many American university intellectuals, expected more than that of courses in modern culture. By studying selected modern ...”

“... sponger who claims to know nothing of ‘the world’. ‘I am a child you know,’ he tells the young wards of John Jarndyce. ‘You are designing people compared with me.’ Skimpole’s main similarity to his real-life source, apart from a talent for accepting handouts, is his conversational manner, which is peculiarly fanciful, fluent and charming, but ...”

“... married an East India Company heiress in 1737, he acquired an estate in County Down, and his son Robert, Castlereagh’s father, married into the Anglican aristocracy. Castlereagh – also Robert Stewart – was largely raised by his Presbyterian grandparents, but educated ecumenically: first at the Anglican grammar school ...”

“... eyes. The market for male ‘general interest’ magazines has grown massively in the UK, as if young men suddenly needed to be celebrated and serviced in a new way, as if there were a new demand among them for reassurance about the wonders of male normalcy. They look for all this in the way people like Tony Parsons have taught them, in a spirit of ...”

“... while still an undergraduate at Columbia, where Mark Van Doren was his teacher and mentor; and Robert Penn Warren was the editor (at Southern Review) whom he first sought to impress. But if the New Critical aesthetic disciplined Berryman it also inhibited him. It gave him a good technical training, but its insistence on what he later called ‘Eliot’s ...”

“... merged into a single script. Not surprisingly, two highly successful journalists, David Holden and Robert Lacey, decided to turn their talents to an exposition of this fascinating modern legend. Unfortunately Holden, a distinguished reporter with many years’ experience of the Middle East labyrinth, never lived to complete his book. He had written the first ...”

“... in the early 1960s, she nonetheless continued picking up nubile girls with aplomb, including (says Robert Schanke) a ‘tubercular young British actress who was a waitress in a coffee shop’. Once one might have welcomed such a seduction, fang marks, TB and all. I remember much relishing de Acosta’s gossipy 1960 ...”