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“... 2011 revolt has already produced two novels that are diametrically opposed in their approach. Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins is a kinetic, docudrama-style retelling of the protest movement as seen by its young vanguard. It is interspersed with real tweets and newspaper quotes, and flaunts its true-to-life cachet: it is dedicated to Alaa Abdel ...”

“... landed a film part with Alan Ladd, Godfrey was doing a commentary for an Alec Guinness film. Robert Hardy came to see him one evening while she was still at the studios and scolded: ‘Godfrey, you’re very lazy sitting about like that. You know what you should be doing? Preparing to play Lear.’ ‘But I didn’t know,’ Hardy said to her ...”

“... pleasure: narcotic, sexual, fiscal – it has not been a particularly auspicious one either. For Robert Louis Stevenson, literary impersonation wasn’t only an essential tutelary tool but also a way for mature authors to widen their range. Out of imitation, Stevenson felt, could spring originality: pastiche was an indispensable way to harness what he called ...”

“... at the gate’. Aldington and H.D. had liked to imagine that their marriage resembled that of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but it’s rare for two poets to have a happy marriage. He tried to justify his actions by reproaching H.D., telling her that what he perceived as her ‘ardour for perfection’ was making her deeply unhappy; he told her ...”

“... ruins became teaching aids in a series of lectures on the sinfulness and transience of tyranny. Robert Hillenbrand’s meditations on Eastern ruins may similarly lead his readers to thoughts of mortality and transience. Many of the buildings he studies in Islamic Architecture have an overt function – whether prayer, teaching, interment or pleasure – yet ...”

“... Restorations Inside, they were polishing the floor: Planks pried from a sunken schooner Dried out, worm holes intact – so that If you spilled your drink, some of it Could possibly drip into the cellar (which was older than the schooner, walls of river limestone mixed with brick of a trading post called Whiskey Center – during the War of 1812 partisans had hidden behind barrels of liquor and flour though the more successful ones had tripped at daybreak into the marsh to suck through reeds – a sort of gunboat diplomacy gone awry – the Indians kept changing sides, plus they knew all the forest paths of escape – their misfortune was in thinking this was a passing occurrence like a holiday that only happened once ...”

“... The Auld Enemy There they are, bonny fechters, rank on tattery rank, Murderer-saints, missionaries, call-centre workers, Tattoos, Bunneted tartans weaving together Darkest hours, blazes of glory, Led by a First Bawheid, rampant, hair fizzin, sheepsheared, Scrummin doon, pally wi their out-of-town allies, Wallace fae Califaustralia, Big Mac, an Apple Mac, Back from the backwoods, wi Rob Fergusson, Hume, Sawney Bean – See how yon lot yawn and yell and stretch Right owre from Blantyre tae Blantyre, Perth to subtropical Perth! Wait till ye catch the whites o their eyes, aye, The specky, pinky-flecky whites o their eyes Worn out from ogling down a Royal Mile o microscopes, or fou Wi dollars n yen signs, or glaikit wi bardic blindness ...”

“... Native Language Overnight I’ve listened to thirty Vancouver stories, Not leaving my room. My jet-lagged ear Tunes in to verticals beaming cold H2O Ten levels higher, twenty ceilings below, Blueprinting every floor of the building, Floating each a little, draining it slowly away Down chutes, round U-bends. Hung-over minibar glasses Emit high pings, a dawn chorus of different pitches, Conjuring water, till this suite itself Gurgles like a basin, though each room’s extractor-fan dry ...”

“... comparative weakness on this side of the question can also be seen in his brief comments on Robert Oppenheimer. Here, however, he does not use the available primary documents; the known and admitted facts of the Oppenheimer-Eltenton affair are much more complex, and far more damaging to Oppenheimer’s credibility than Holloway allows. This aspect of ...”

“... There was a story that began –’ begins Sabbatical, and the story is then interrupted for two nights and a day by a storm at sea, itself interrupted by a dialogue on Aristotle’s distinction between lexis and melos. Like most Post-Modernist fantasies, Sabbatical takes a lot of unpacking. But this is John Barth in holiday mood, and a virtuoso display of techniques brought together from different kinds of novel is here frankly offered for enjoyment ...”

“... Wales’ Work by a mysterious process of osmosis. My Marlow, if I dare call him that, is named Robert Racine and has no connection with Raymond Chandler, who never lived in the Rue Jacob. It is now clear that ‘Racine’ evolved out of my brush with la Champmeslé and her successors; where the rest came from is open to conjecture. But there I ...”

“... All That, as one literary man’s war memoirs with another’s, I’m struck by the contrast with Robert Graves’s modernity. It doesn’t seem to matter that his was an earlier war, or a different kind of war – Mr Powell’s being much more the contemporary kind we know about – but Graves was modern in that his personal involvement is so much more vivid ...”

“... he grows younger while others grow old. This is an excuse for an extended love story, in which Robert’s mistress is succeeded by her daughter and then her granddaughter (and in a PS, his own great-granddaughter). If it thus recalls Hardy’s The Well-Beloved, it is worth the comparison and they have ideas in common: ‘I saw that I had never loved her. I ...”

“... introduction, by Carole Fink. Readers who have derived their idea of what the war was like from Robert Graves, Erich Maria Remarque or Vera Brittain may be surprised, and even slightly shocked, by what they find in these pages. There is no bitterness towards those held responsible for the war, no sense of betrayal by the older generation, no shattering of ...”

“... after the Latin ‘Franciscanus’ of George Buchanan (1506-82) A barren haugh. No flowers, no trees for miles. No use for harvest. Barbed-wire thistles spatter Dour, poisoned fields. Bare space. Hoofprints of cows. Dysart, folk call it. Under desert earth Vulcan’s mile-long unmined coal still smeeks In runnelled caves. Random, lung-clogging fires Belch out all over through the veins of rock, Firing up flumes of fumes, and, underfoot, Pica-fine, pitch-black clouds smother the soil ...”