“... on a map? No doubt financial constraints were the main cause of this information blackout, but it may also have seemed excusable because of our uncertainty about what sort of thing a translation of a poem is: how much, and what, we need to know in order to make sense of it. Translation necessarily cuts poems loose from their origins: it carries them not only ...”

“... used to describe above all the work of Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984). Microhistorians have turned to the verbatim records of interrogations kept in the law courts of early modern Europe (or at least those parts of Europe where Roman law procedures were followed) to reconstruct the ...”

“... servants, poor whites and planters looked down on the ‘natives’ and up to the bigwigs. It may be that Duras was raped when she was four; in any case, sex came into her life early on and it was a nasty business, although Adler refrains from any obvious psychoanalytical interpretations. From Cambodia the family moved to Cochin China, surviving on Mme ...”

“... of the present book as though he took part in this war on the virtuous side. Yet such is the case. Robert Kidd appeared on the recorded scene in 1689 at the age of about 44, as one of the crew of a buccaneering ship in the West Indies. Buccaneering and piracy were often much the same thing. Piracy had not yet acquired anything like the full odium of later ...”

“... to 1972ish) were irresistible. They have been the good fortune and the curse of my generation (‘May you live through interesting times’): we thank our lucky stars that our time for being young was then and not the Eighties or Nineties, but found – or find – ourselves a little slow to get on with the getting on, hypnotised as we are by the brief period ...”

“... of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at Yaddo in 1948. Gordon had impeccable literary credentials. As a young writer, she had been mentored by Ford Madox Ford, who had her read an early draft of her first novel, Penhally, out loud to him. She was edited by ...”

“... can be, and what a torture of guilt it makes breaking away.’Auden was 15 when his schoolfriend Robert Medley suggested that he might try his hand at writing poems.Kicking a little stone, he turned to meAnd said, ‘Tell me, do you write poetry?’I never had, and said so, but I knewThat very moment what I wished to do.At 15, Auden knew, too, that he was ...”

“... as having given birth to Social Darwinism. Progress, however, has now found a new champion in Robert Wright. Wright, then on the staff of the New Republic, first entered the fray in 1990, with a lengthy (and unfavourable) review of Gould’s anti-progress manifesto, Wonderful Life. Then, deciding perhaps to make a career out of disagreeing with Gould, he ...”

“... summer, we have the heat index, first proposed in 1979 by the Australian environmental scientist Robert Steadman in an article in the Journal of Applied Meteorology entitled ‘The Assessment of Sultriness Part I: A Temperature-Humidity Index Based on Human Physiology and Clothing Science’. Steadman’s index depends on two variables – temperature and ...”

“... in France under Edward III and the Black Prince, and independently on their own account: Robert Knowles and Hugh Calverley for instance. But none achieved quite such fame or rose quite so high as Sir John Hawkwood, the ‘diabolical Englishman’ of Stonor Saunders’s book, did in Italy. His military achievement and reputation carried him steadily ...”

“... by the socialist parties, represented the mainstream of the labour movement from the 1890s. Brower may be right about the strikes (the statistics aren’t good enough to prove it either way), but I wonder whether his approach to the problem of labour violence isn’t merely a reworking of the old buntarstvo stereotype – the notion of ‘dark’ and ...”

“... most of these details from the helpful introduction to The Soul of a Patriot by its translator, Robert Porter. The manuscript had to wait ‘in the desk-drawer’ until 1989 before it was published in Russia, and it is the first of Popov’s novels to be published in English. Porter tells us that in an interview Popov named his own favourite writers as ...”

“... and later as a special military adviser to Boris Yeltsin. But revealing though these materials may have been, Lenin’s flaws were hardly invisible before access became possible. Volkogonov is quite candid about the main reason for his and others’ loss of faith in Lenin. ‘We began to doubt his infallibility above all because the “cause” which he ...”

“... on the other, as probably it is. This is not the first instance we have seen in modern history. It may be that the political options are so inexorably black and white that the right public choice seems to subsume all the private virtues. But such a vision excludes the accidents, the mixture of motives, the inherited irrationalities that are the normal ...”

“... than early Pink Floyd – going on to produce a few grand creative talents in their own right. Robert Wyatt is the big survivor of the Soft Machine, a Hugo Ball at full lifespan to the band’s jaunty evocations of Dada. But there was also Daevid Allen, the founder of Gong, and Kevin Ayers, an eclectic-comic figure of some talent – in many ways the ...”