“... has cropped up so frequently in American mythology he has become an icon of the country’s self-divisions and betrayals. Jones doesn’t present Baggit sentimentally or symbolically; if his death is significant, it’s mainly because it happens to coincide with the news of Jim Morrison’s, on 9 July 1971. It is while brooding on his great idol’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and don’t get anywhere within hailing distance of Jenkins Ear. The date is significant: Robert Walpole had died in 1745, and a year later his son’s arrested political development brings him back to the quarrels of a previous generation. Many people are liberated by the death of a dominant parent: Horace felt the full burden of his past only when ...”

“... at the ready, would have concurred. Sampson’s book was called English for the English. However, Robert Crawford’s new collection of essays makes it emphatically clear that our present political context calls for quite a different perspective: one, as his earlier Devolving English Literature implies, more firmly focused on a latter-day drama in which the ...”

“... role in that most celebrated of literary love affairs, between Elizabeth and her fellow poet Robert Browning. Famously eloping in 1846 to escape her tyrannical father, they honeymooned in Pisa, and it was here one morning that Elizabeth shyly slipped a sheaf of papers into her new husband’s pocket. She hurried back to her private study, leaving ...”

“... the plantation in Beloved, the mental ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the bus in Robert Olen Butler’s Mr Spaceman all function as metaphors for the creative writing workshop.) McGurl also provides a smart and useful typology of ‘programme’ fiction (defined as the prose work of MFA graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main ...”

“... books of selected pieces. He also worked as a part-time TV performer, conducting interviews, doing self-scripted monologues, taking part in round-table discussions and generally making his presence felt on screen. In 1982, he got his own programme, Clive James on Television, and became a mass-market celebrity. Clip show presenter, chat-show host, star of a ...”

“... to it. When not staking his claim to Shakespeare he deliberately chose roles that reinforced his self-casting as a defiant, athletic personification of all-American patriotism. His favourites included Spartacus, depicted as a virtuous rebel against some very British-looking patricians in Robert Montgomery Bird’s ...”

“... be the similarity of presentation in the placing of images on the paper, between, for example, the Self-Portrait of 1943, the famous Christian Bérard (to be shown only in facsimile) and the more recent portraits of lord Goodman (etched and drawn) – all of them with pillows, but only pillows, behind the figure. Less obviously noticeable will be how the nudes ...”

“... I bought from him more than ten years ago, maybe fifteen years ago, which I first saw with Robert Armstrong in late December 1980 in his studio in Gorey, Co. Wexford, rests against the wall of the room where I work. We are uneasy with each other now. The talk turns to Christmas and he mentions the sadness of Gorey and that extraordinary space he made ...”

“... 1982, Terry McCluskie and his friend Raymond Reynolds picked a fight with a total stranger, Robert Ford, and stabbed him to death. Ford was 15 years old and had just taken his girl-friend home after spending an evening at a local Citizens’ Band radio club. McCluskie, also 15, and Reynolds, 14, had spent the evening drinking and were on their way to a ...”

“... said to be the remains of monastic huts. A place, then, strongly associated in the Irish mind with self-denial, contemplation, spiritual renewal; a place, too, that has attracted writers like Sean O’Faolain, Denis Devlin, William Carleton and Patrick Kavanagh; a place where the individual might decently ruminate on his relationship with society.This setting ...”

“... with these books need not be apprehensive, however: The Truth about Lorin Jones is perfectly self-contained. Indeed, that self-contained quality helps to account for the powerful, painful oppressiveness of the book, as Polly Alter becomes more and more deeply enmeshed in her quest for the eponymous woman she is ...”

“... mood was infectious among the personnel in charge of exterminating the brutes. The Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan cheerfully reported that ‘Welcome to Injun Country’ was the refrain among American soldiers worldwide. The primal blood-lusts of the war on terror survived Obama’s renaming of it. The Seal Team that in 2011 eventually scalped Osama bin Laden ...”

“... on much for a definition of humanity, since he has had so little time to meet any of the species. Robert Heinlein’s totally self-indulgent The cat who walks through walls (to be acquitted of malignant sexism only on the ground that it is also so innocently pubescent) has made its author two million dollars so far. The ...”