“... which pays is the kind which submits itself entirely to the poetic process. The Selected Poems of Robert Wells also give the impression of having been carefully worked over, but he is not plagued with quirkiness or ingenuity, as Cassity seems often to be. In his poems the sensible world matters for its own sake rather than for the sake of any notions that can ...”

“... were resettled in a ‘model’ village along with their forebears’ gravestones. By contrast Robert Macfarlane’s accounts are nothing if not first-hand. He is a literary scholar who has spent many hundreds of hours walking in England and the Scottish Highlands, in Spain, Palestine and Tibet. His aim here is to describe some of his most memorable ...”

“... editor in the early 1960s. It must have seemed strange to read the poetry of Pound, Williams, Robert Duncan, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Robert Creeley and Louis Zukofsky in a right-wing political journal. ‘Don’t worry about the Birch boys,’ Kenner wrote to Davenport in 1961, trying to persuade him to contribute to the ...”

“... of thought and art that has gone into it. An Ancient Castle is a children’s story written by Robert Graves in the early Thirties and only recently discovered among a collection of his manuscripts. It, too, brings an air from earlier days, those that followed the First War, with their memories of old-fashioned virtues, now threatened by chicanery and ...”

“... through the diseased consciousness of our selves as beings awash in limitless oceans of time. Robert Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress is a bewilderingly awful book. But it certainly does offer us a distorting mirror of a kind. Nisbet is a conservative American sociologist of some prominence (the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities Emeritus ...”

“... of his imaginative life and the drudgery which gave him his living. This, then, is the theme of Robert Essick’s book: the centrality of printmaking to the understanding of Blake’s composite art, and the interdependence of his commercial and imaginative life. It is one of the most penetrating and informative books to have appeared on Blake in recent ...”

“... of the British Empire against three major powers in three different theatres of war.’ Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, had put the same point more succinctly three years earlier: ‘We are greatly overlanded.’ We now have ample evidence that, in the 1930s, ministers and their service advisers were more and more ...”

“... have a large collection of Monets (say) than that Buffalo University should have a collection of Robert Graves manuscripts (say). I view with unconcern the drift of British manuscripts to America, where our language is spoken and our literature studied. So one must travel to California to read, for example, Amis’s several unpublished novels: the ...”

“... to them. The author of the entry on animals in the Oxford Companion to the Mind, the ethologist Robert Hinde, writes that ‘chimpanzees have a conception of the self and can dissemble and deceive others,’ and that there is strong evidence that ‘dogs have pleasant and unpleasant dreams.’ Someone must have forgotten to warn Hinde that such discourse is ...”

“... on the muzak and the mailing of America. It is no small relief, therefore, to be reminded by Robert Middlekauf, a leading historian of the American Enlightenment, that Franklin was in fact a complicated and charming man with the will heartily to dislike any number of people who stood in his way. People like William Penn, for example, the absentee ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of faith. All this is a far cry from the myth of unbroken hostility between Russia and Islam. Robert Crews makes many of these points in his new book on Russia’s management of its Muslim subjects from the reign of Catherine the Great until 1917. Unfortunately, to make up for the sins of past generations, Crews overcompensates. ‘The tsarist ...”

“... from The Year’s Afternoon, presents an altogether more benevolent vision of life at sea, as Robert Louis Stevenson launches Dunn on the ‘Seven Seas’ pollutionless stretches that wander for miles and miles’. The ending is unblushingly nostalgic: ‘Ah, Stevenson, your pages pleased me as a boy./Now that I’m not, I weep over them, and with ...”

“... always dresses up in her best clothes. Their sex life, such as it ever was, is faltering badly. Robert, their 18-year-old son (Charlie is in his late forties, Maureen ten years younger), is unemployed, and Charlie disapproves of him, calls him a ‘layabout’. It breaks his mother’s heart when he leaves home and moves into a squat. Charlie has a younger ...”

“... the main author of Trump’s 2018 National Defence Strategy; the former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who describes China as part of an ‘axis of anti-American autocracies’; and Robert Lighthizer, the leading Republican trade warrior who speaks of China as a totalitarian state – will return to ...”