“... No one ever failed more completely to be the hero of his own life than the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, for whom heroism was an obsession. He used his own head as a model for Christ, Solomon, Alexander and Marcus Curtius and believed that heroic history painting was the highest form of art. Today his only generally remembered work is a portrait of Wordsworth ...”

“... 1945? Culturally, economically and socially the answers might be yes – ‘structuralists’ may even speculate about a slow process of liberalisation analogous to Spain’s, albeit without the push of turismo. But politically that outcome was always impossible because Nazi Germany was Hitler’s Germany, and Hitler wanted war even more than he wanted ...”

“... Film Festival in 1962) and screenwriter: his credits include Downhill Racer (1969), starring Robert Redford as a champion skier. His novel about mountaineering, Solo Faces (1979), started life as a script for Redford. As well as subsidising some unprofitable novels, the movie business brought Salter into contact with a more hedonistic world: he spent ...”

“... In the​ cold autumn of 1643 Susan Rodway wrote to ‘my king love’, her husband Robert. A candlemaker by trade, he was away fighting for Parliament and she hadn’t heard much from him, unlike her neighbours in the London parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West who all had news from their husbands. Their daughter, Hester, was just a baby and their young son, Willie, was sick ...”

“... role in that most celebrated of literary love affairs, between Elizabeth and her fellow poet Robert Browning. Famously eloping in 1846 to escape her tyrannical father, they honeymooned in Pisa, and it was here one morning that Elizabeth shyly slipped a sheaf of papers into her new husband’s pocket. She hurried back to her private study, leaving ...”

“... with quite the mixture of coolness and condescension accorded to the thoroughly rational man. Robert Musil wrote of the wife of a civil servant that ‘what she called “soul” was nothing but a small capital of capacity for love that she had possessed at the time of her marriage. Permanent Secretary Tuzzi was not the right stock to invest it in ...”

“... That gave you vantage when you would despise: My bankrupt heart has no more tears to spend. Robert Bridges, who, as Martin says, ‘understood perfectly well both Dolben’s role and Hopkins’s emotions in writing’ these sonnets, noted on the autograph copy that they ‘must never be printed’. Had he become a fellow of Balliol and a Classics ...”

“... as a brilliant writer faded with the years; sadly, she is now remembered as much for having been Robert Lowell’s first wife as for her novels and short stories. It is testimony to Capote’s uncanny knack for self-promotion that at the time of the Life feature, he had produced only a handful of short stories: his first novel, Other Voices, Other ...”

“... Theory. A biographer of Keynes has to straddle two very different worlds, and it is one measure of Robert Skidelsky’s achievement that he writes with equal authority of both in this deeply researched and densely textured book. But what marks out his work as truly masterly is his portrayal of the interplay between the private and the public in Keynes, the ...”

“... its true name is the rule of the mob … Heaven help those who by expressing republican sentiment may provoke the rage of the mob.’ The warehouses on the Queens waterfront and on the empty streets leading away from the East River will eventually be torn down and yet another real-estate company will publish brochures for apartments with views of Manhattan ...”

“... and deconstruction. We have had analyses of his work by Charles Mauron, Jean-Pierre Richard, Robert Greer Cohn, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Leo Bersani, Malcolm Bowie and others. It might seem surprising, therefore, not to find a single full-length biography published between Henri Mondor’s 1941 Vie de Mallarmé and Gordon Millan’s ...”

“... last twenty years. They are still turning up: this volume contains letters, formerly unknown, to Robert Mountsier, who later became Lawrence’s agent in the US, and a batch to Douglas Goldring. The volume covers an interesting period. The Lawrences were having a bad time in Cornwall up to October 1917, when they were expelled by the police. Then they ...”

“... place the day after the French defeat at Sedan. Marcel was born ten months later, on 10 July 1871. Robert, the brother famously absent from almost everything Proust wrote, was born when Marcel was not quite two. What is striking in this as in other accounts of the Proust household is the extent to which the boys seemed to belong to two entirely separate ...”

“... Eugène Sigismondovitch Politovsky, author of From Libau to Tsushima, published after his death in May 1905. Dredging Politovsky up from history for a commission he received from the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull in 1983, Douglas Dunn has made him the narrator of his book-length poem The Donkey’s Ears. It’s been a long journey for Politovsky this time round ...”

“... rather detachedly the behaviour and motives of his fellow-lodger’. These words were penned by Robert Latham’s collaborator, William Matthews, who died in 1976. He was a scholar in the old style, not given to trendy assimilation of historic sources into the narratology of modern angst. But his effort to see the diary as something more than ...”