“... that Barrett’s poems were unnecessarily ‘obscure’ – a common complaint about the work of Robert Browning which she also repeatedly echoed. Often EBB penitently acknowledges the fault – ‘my obscure devil’ – just as she often insists on the inevitable cloudiness of those who strive after the sublime. Aeschylus, after all, was ‘the sublimest ...”

“... and I was reprimanded by both of them for having used the word “spit”.’ In his introduction, Robert Giroux incorrectly identifies the offending story as ‘The Farmer’s Children’ – an implacable masterpiece which he stigmatises as ‘more conventional and sentimental than anything else she wrote’. ‘The Farmer’s Children’ is devoid of ...”

“... the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the stuff) or by ...”

“... by this bench marked the completion of the final phase of its construction. Since 1568, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who had been made lord of Kenilworth in 1563, had been pouring money into the castle so it would be fit to accommodate the queen. Elizabeth visited in 1566, 1568 and 1572, but he didn’t finish his alterations until the last and ...”

“... shipwreck, showmanship, early death – also bring to mind the life and career of Robert Louis Stevenson, another Scottish writer who looked at human adventure as a brand of metaphysics. Nowadays, people with a heart for proper adventure (or ‘extreme sports’) like to load themselves with equipment and dive into the ocean looking for ...”

“... a social one: she was proud of owning Anatole France but was not in the least gratified when Count Robert de Montesquiou, one of the originals of Charlus and a devastating snob himself, made up to her. All such matters had to be modified until they could become part of Proust’s world; and Painter shows how the complication and contingency of real lives were ...”

“... both Philby and Burgess, was recalled to Moscow and shot. During the three-year period covered by Robert Conquest in Inside Stalin’s Secret Police the NKVD leadership was twice liquidated. Nikolai Yezhov, who succeeded G.G. Yagoda as head of the NKVD in September 1936, purged most of Yagoda’s men in the spring of 1937 (though Yagoda himself was not shot ...”

“... on the martyr’s role: ‘I have a death-thing, I know ...’ he told his official biographer Robert Shelton in one of his more revealing interviews, as if confiding to an apostle. The concerts themselves often turned into furious confrontations between performers and audience, with disgruntled folk-music lovers heckling throughout the rock ‘n’ roll ...”

“... period confront us from the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in silence, is Robert Morris’s big low cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No self-respecting museum would present a combination which was so insouciant ...”

“... in the arts. The outcomes of these are mixed. At best, these artists and writers could say, as Robert Rauschenberg did of his alliance with Jasper Johns, that ‘we gave each other permission.’ And ‘there was that business of triggering energies,’ Johns said. At worst, there is André Malraux saying to Clara Malraux: ‘Better to be my wife than a ...”

“... Marooned in the ‘painful but glorious days’ of his past, he rather resembles the characters of Robert Olen Butler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: all of these concern South Vietnamese immigrants who have settled, for the most part happily, in Louisiana, yet who hark constantly back to their ...”

“... for it. In England, reputed ‘conjurors’ like John Dee, Thomas Hariot, William Warner and Robert Fludd were engaged in important transitional research in such areas as engineering, optics, cartography, pharmacy and metallurgy. They were early technologists, though still working within an animistic, non-scientific context. A formative influence here ...”

“... leather industry provided a livelihood, not only for Marlowe’s family, but also for that of Robert Greene and William Shakespeare, sons respectively of a Norwich saddler and a Stratford glover. Even here in Canterbury there were other young writers growing up: John Lyly, son of Peter Lyly, clerk to the consistorial court; and Stephen Gosson, a ...”

“... at every street corner. They saw the end, even for the most renewable resources. One of these was Robert Lamb, who in 1979 published a book called World without Tree. ‘A survey of current evidence,’ he wrote, ‘shows that trees could be so scarce in a mere thirty years’ time that they would already be struggling to fulfil their purpose in the global ...”

“... The belief underlies his veneration for the great ‘talking heads’ like Lord Clark and Robert Hughes, as in a more general way it underlies his love affair with British TV ‘culture’ when it is not merely mausoleum-like. Clearly James’s feeling for British culture is that of the outsider who can dissimulate an insider’s manner, but who will ...”