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“... immersed in Homer, the other in the Georgics, Eclogues and Aeneid. If the turn of spirit in, say, Robert Graves and Saint-Jean Perse is radically Homeric, that in T.S. Eliot and Valéry is unmistakably Virgilian. The equations become non-linear, as it were, by virtue of the several presences of Dante. Recalling early childhood, Proust sees himself trailing ...”

“... a reconsideration of the work of three unjustly neglected poets, Weldon Kees, Henri Coulette and Robert Boardman Vaughn – though Vaughn can hardly be described as neglected since only three of his poems ever made their way into print. In a preamble to a discussion of their work he broods on the ‘slide or plunge into oblivion that awaits virtually ...”

“... movement is now probably best remembered by the outstanding writers associated with it, such as Robert Penn Warren (All the King’s Men), John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, even Robert Lowell, who literally pitched his tent on Tate’s lawn. All of these must have responded warmly to ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... most fateful hallmark lies not in 1492 but in that period from 950 to 1350 which is the subject of Robert Bartlett’s remarkable book. Bartlett has written an absorbing account of how a common culture emerged throughout what now regards itself as Europe. His subject is the central Middle Ages, because it was then that Europe assumed its present shape. Between ...”

“... the naturalist away from home, Godwin asked Darwin’s wife for a letter of introduction to Robert Bage instead. To his surprise, Mary Darwin said she could not properly provide one since, though Bage was her husband’s ‘very particular friend’, she wasn’t sure she had ever set eyes on him. Undeterred, Godwin determined to introduce himself to ...”

“... Scottish Renaissance into the Beatnik era, establishing important transatlantic connections with Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, Lorine Niedecker and others. The break-up of his first marriage in 1964 terminated this period of relative stability, initiating the chapter of uncertainty that coincided with his first letters to Stephen Bann. At no stage in ...”

“... from New South Wales, both came to a speedy end: one died and the other was shot by a gamekeeper. Robert Cecil is said to have given his parakeet claret. A zebra brought from Ethiopia by the East India Company in 1826 was allowed to make frequent visits to the canteen of the Royal Menagerie to drink ale, of which it was reported to be ‘exceedingly ...”

“... such a show of racial animus. Even his unillusioned anti-Rousseauist notions about savages or the savage state were concerned with men’s radical depravity and misery in a non-civilised or pre-civilised state, not with any specific racial make-up: ‘Children are always cruel. Savages are always cruel.’ It followed that any group he thought of as ...”

“... had had to pay for being labelled as experimental artists was, it seemed, no longer being exacted. Robert Coover, born in 1932, certainly has no reason to complain of neglect. ‘America’s most outrageous novelist presents a new, wildly comic and erotic entertainment,’ screamed the paperback edition, ten years ago, of his long novel The Public Burning. The ...”

“... about post-war America: vulgarity, self-promotion and hustle; the giant-finned American cars in Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’, that slide by on grease with ‘a savage servility’; the slippery, oily and false. Americanism, slickness and writing come together in impressions that render Plath as all shiny ...”

“... as Lloyd George’s secretary at the Versailles Peace Conference, and there he took the most savage line about reparations. In the Thirties, he saw the dire economic and political consequences of his policy; remorse overwhelmed him and he went too far in the other direction, doing everything he could to conciliate Germany. Fox presents him as a brilliant ...”

“... him in some odd directions and up some dead ends: one thinks of the reductio ad absurdum of The Savage God (1971), his study of suicide, in which he claimed that the arts could ‘survive morally’ only by virtue of the artist ‘in his role as scapegoat ... testing out his own death and vulnerability for and on himself’. At the same time, as editor of ...”

“... a certain vagueness to the reality of the texts. In any case, the fact that Duras and her husband, Robert Antelme, joined the Resistance in 1943, and that Antelme was arrested and deported to Buchenwald, made any worries about her early novels seem less pressing. I now think that my own will to preserve the faint aura of mystery surrounding early Duras at the ...”

“... unexpected alternatives – Dickens (oddly represented by a diatribe against the idea of the Noble Savage), Tennyson, Kipling, Conrad, Lawrence, Yeats – Carey presents a wonderfully rich array of obscure writers from many cultures and different eras, virtually all with vivid imaginations of the best of all possible worlds (or in a few cases, their dystopian ...”