“... need evidently felt by its audience for authoritative/enthusiastic communicators (Kenneth Clark, Robert Hughes, Wendy Beckett) which no other artistic public feels – though these things are doubtless relevant. I mean the priority given to a mode of address: when the critic performs, not by talking to us about work to which we’re both assumed to have ...”

“... political philosophy. It was, peculiarly, Wilt Chamberlain on whom the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick chose to hang his full-blown critique of the interventionist state. The argument runs as follows. Imagine a society of perfect distributive justice according to any model you happen to prefer, in which everyone possesses precisely what they ought to ...”

“... faith          Was easy prey to his malignancy …The word ‘prey’ feels how intimate may be the bonds between trusting and tasting. Both the first and this last poem in the book speak of ‘my tongue’.Field Work is alive with trust (how else would field work be possible?), and it could have been created only by an experienced poet secure in the ...”

“... a woman who kept her inner life sealed off from scrutiny. Indeed her preoccupation with surfaces may have been her deepest trait. Joe and Rose Kennedy led separate lives: he pursued money, sex and political ambition; she strained after moral and social perfection. They were united in their obsession with keeping up appearances, their pleasure in consorting ...”

“... of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of ...”

“... as ‘head of state’ and talking of ‘I, as a government’. Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson may have fulminated against her, in the course of reviewing this book, but they helped launch the good ship Thatcher and sailed in her fatly for many a year, long sustaining and defending her against those who objected from the outset to government by ...”

“... suggests both the magical power of Hollywood, and its less than democratic creative constitution. Robert Ray’s A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema: 1930-1980 (its title playing on a controversial 1954 piece about the French cinema by François Truffaut in Cahiers du Cinéma) is the work of an intelligent American lover of American films engaging ...”

“... object. As he remarked one day, ‘It was an excellent question of my lady Cotton, when Sir Robert Cotton was magnifying of a shoe, which was Mose’s or Noah’s, and wondering at the strange shape and fashion of it: But Mr Cotton, says she, are you sure it is a shoe?’ The 20th-century art historian Martin Kemp has spent his life reconstructing the ...”

“... other play is a fictional murder story set in Italy). The title page attributes this quarto to one Robert Yarington, otherwise unknown as an author. He was probably only the copyist – a Robert Yarington is recorded as a member of the Scriveners’ Company in 1603, and had a brother, John, who was also a scrivener ...”

“... in the army, Jasper Johns, aged 23, moved back to New York City. There, a few months later, he met Robert Rauschenberg. Their artistic and romantic partnership would last until 1961; the company they kept included John Cage and Merce Cunningham. In this heady atmosphere, Johns chose, in autumn 1954, to destroy all his prior work, and to begin the paintings ...”

“... family, so Clancy was doubly betrayed while hardly acknowledged – he grew up with Jimmy Cagney, Robert Mitchum and Clark Gable as his ‘movie fathers’. From an early age he developed what he calls a ‘star astigmatism’. R.D. Laing later told him he had ‘the makings of a first-class schizophrenic’. His problem, he admits, was ‘slipp[ing] onto the ...”

“... or says that the fourth stanza of the poem ‘re-opens the ambiguities of the third’, which it may do in 1842, but not in 1832, where, besides the changes in the text, the order of the stanzas is reversed. Comparing ‘Mariana’ with ‘Mariana in the South’, Tucker states that when the southern Mariana ‘sees images pass her door in stanzas six and ...”

“... start on the question of what a poem, as distinct from any other sort of proposition or utterance, may have to tell us, or show us, about violence.Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied onesAppear and disappear in the blue depth of the skyWith all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,And ...”

“... at the door of Sasha’s horrible hotel room, is certainly memorable. The strange comfort of it may be the drug the Rhys addict goes for, for the commis voyageur is everything to be fled from which becomes our fate in the end. Good Morning, Midnight finally appeared on the eve of the Second World War, and vanished without trace. No one at that time was ...”

“... In the case of a living artist, the wish, being capable of fulfilment, has a potency which may distract as much as concentrate the mind and the feelings; and with an artist like Dylan, who has a cult following, the element of wish-fulfilment can have some disturbing effects, as Paul Williams revealed in a candid self-analysis: ‘There’s a terrible ...”