“... procreational theory that constructs the male role as creative and the female role as nurturing. (Robert Alter is praised for using the word ‘seed’ in his translation of Genesis, where others fudge the problem by using ‘posterity’, ‘descendants’ or ‘progeny’. But the praise is immediately revoked: ‘Writing in the late 20th century, he cannot ...”

“... authors of the Middle English ‘Charters of Christ’ saw when they compared God’s sacrificial Lamb to the lambs that supplied their writing material. As the Word made flesh, Christ declares that his body, like parchment, was stretched on a frame and dried on a tree. Then the letters that spell redemption were inscribed on his skin, with nails for ...”

“... than thirty men’. Then follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles ...”

“... a desperate situation to work his best, or indeed to work at all. Wordsworth made the comment that Robert Southey, Coleridge’s brother-in-law, ‘writes too much at his ease’, but the criticism could equally have applied to Wordsworth himself, not because Wordsworth found composition easy – it gave him the psychosomatic pains which only afflicted ...”

“... and frequently paralysis of the writing arm or, as we would say, repetitive strain injury. Charles Lamb records in ‘The Superannuated Man’ the misery of his years in Mincing Lane as a writer for the EIC. He became haunted by a sense of incapacity for business: ‘I had perpetually a dread of some crisis, to which I should be found unequal. Besides my ...”

“... be the Shelley ménage – in a book that also explores his biographical ‘intimacy’ with Robert Louis Stevenson, Gérard de Nerval and Mary Shelley’s remarkable mother Mary Wollstonecraft – that occasions the reflection. There is something about ‘the Shelley circle’, and particularly its bizarre life abroad, that produces this effect. At its ...”

“... appeared confused, irritated or bored by him, classic reactions of age to the heroes of youth. Robert Carringer’s sharp-eyed, dispassionate post-mortem on what actually happened in the making of Kane, and Barbara Leaming’s almost embarrassingly intimate monitoring of the variations in the maker’s oft-told tales during what turned out to be the last ...”

“... to keep the ‘belly gods’ in check. Like all cultural expressions of the late modern condition, Robert Atkins and his low-carb kin both share in tradition and depart from it in telling ways. Consider how the LoCarbistas stand with respect to the appetites and the will. Virtually all the most popular diet writers of the last three decades thumb their noses ...”

“... contain huge leaps in time, which are intended to illustrate this. Her American readership is like Robert Frost’s: read by every American schoolchild, both have to be rescued from the flag-wavers with strenous reminders of their ‘dark’ seriousness and formal excellence. In Cather’s case, there is also the rich and bedeviling problem of how to frame her ...”

“... Carpenter skilfully weaves the friends – Connolly, Betjeman, Anthony Powell, Brian Howard, Robert Byron – into a completed composition, the others serve chiefly to start a scene or two and swell the progress of Waugh himself. Of course this gives a misleading picture of period and individuals, but that is in a sense the object of the exercise, for ...”

“... and motor-flights: a manner of life portrayed as a violent contrast with the eremitic existence of Lamb House, James’s snug Rye corner: ‘Your letters come into my damp desert here even as the odour of promiscuous spices or the flavour of lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon might be wafted to some compromised oasis from a caravan of the Arabian nights.’ The ...”

“... Berlin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Harry Levin, W.H. Auden, Malraux, James Baldwin, Stravinsky, Robert Lowell etc. None of these people, however, furnishes Wilson with anything like a satisfying number of thoughtful passages in the journals. This is partly a result of misleading editing by Lewis Dabney, who divides the book into 19 sections and dozens of ...”

“... drawbridge and artificially-ruined keep – an enterprise vividly described not long ago in Robert Martin’s biography of the poet. Decades later, Charles’s nephew, the Poet Laureate, could pay no higher tribute to the late Prince Consort than by dedicating the first several Idylls of the King to his memory as ‘Scarce other than my king’s ideal ...”

“... 1975), and in English by Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984), involves giving a detailed description of events in the lives of ordinary people and is almost always based on court records – A Trial of Witches is a good, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter a fine, and Shaman of ...”

“... he transforms a Blakean song of innocence into a Mephistophelean rag of experience: ‘Little lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? . . . Doctor Wilmut made thee, Doctor Ian Wilmut cloned thee outside Edinburgh.’ For the dying man ‘this dangerous demon’ of replication has it in for the artist in particular: ‘the technology the artist ...”