“... The Compleat Drawing-Book​, published by Fleet Street printseller Robert Sayer in 1755, is a handbook for the amateur artist that aims to provide ‘Proper Instructions to Youth for their Entertainment and Improvement in this Art’. The core of the book is a series of ‘Many and Curious Specimens’: prints from images ‘engrav’d on one hundred copper-plates’ that present vignettes to study and copy ...”

“... Cambridge, he takes pains to show how religious controversy and pedagogical needs, quarrels over craft organisation and innovations in technology interacted in that uniquely contested and productive place, the printer’s shop. The book is studded with details of authors’ lives and publishers’ practices – with a wealth of precise and striking ...”

“... Again, translation was the only mode of access. From the time of Browning and Swinburne to that of Robert Lowell, Anglo-American poetry has, under a modernistic veneer, been anxiously conservative. It has assembled the treasures of the past and mimed them with passionate nostalgia before closing time. Hence the primal dramatic function of allusion and ...”

“... of arms to the Iranians from 1985 onwards, of the ludicrously misconceived mission to Tehran by Robert McFarlane in May 1986, and of the use to which the profits of the sales were put, have been the subject of inquiries by the combined Senate and House Select Committee. The major questions were whether the President knew of the diversion of funds from the ...”

“... with La Boîte-en-valise, also confused the opposition between industrial production and artisanal craft.) ‘The replicas unsettled the museum,’ the curators write. This is an understatement; many Duchamp devotees (such as Daniel Buren, an artist associated with ‘institutional critique’ in the 1970s) branded them a betrayal. For his part Duchamp ...”

“... portrait miniature from the medieval art of manuscript illumination. Some of the secrets of the craft are disclosed in Hilliard’s treatise The Art of Limning, drafted around 1599 but left unfinished, and now preserved in a unique scribal copy in Edinburgh University Library. In it he describes the ideal studio as having a northerly or north-easterly ...”

“... may fail, but an overlooked one will not succeed. According to the Thomas Theorem popularised by Robert Merton: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’ David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old, with its ironic echoes of bestsellers by Robert Hughes and Alvin Toffler, is not an attack on ...”

“... at the beginning.’ Daily life there ‘added up to one long steady protest’, with poets – Robert Duncan, Robert Bly, Gary Snyder – joining in: the engagé styles that repelled other American writers showed Heaney ‘what it meant to be American. There was a trust that things could be changed.’America meant ...”

“... It is quite true that London clearly had the greatest respect for not only literary craft but for the kind of critical principles that were taught at the universities he sporadically attended and even lectured at. He never affected any degree of philistinism, as his successors were to do, but was as much in love with learning as he was with ...”

“... that somewhere along the line he absorbed the influence, for example, of the Minnesota poets, Robert Bly and James Wright. He has the same candour and simplicity, and, like them, sometimes lays himself open to a charge of naivety – technical as much as emotional, if we can distinguish between the two. But his naivety, if such it is, differs ...”

“... issue. Ern Malley was a poet invented by two young men who thought Modernism had destroyed the craft of verse. They compiled his poems by picking fragments at random from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Shakespeare and a dictionary of quotations. For many Australians, this hoax confirmed that Modernism was a fraud. Others believed that anyone might be taken ...”

“... shirkers, bullshitters, jerrybuilders and out-and-out cowboys. You hear a lot of nonsense about craft and craftsmanship; but the truth is that in order to publish anything you have to be prepared to bodge and skimp: you have to believe that this, after all, will do. If you don’t, you’re Harold Brodkey. If you still believe that writers work hard, go and ...”

“... The visual package in this book might once have been marketed to showcase a selection of poems by Robert Frost. The text is calm and informative, and quietly redundant – like Norman Mailer’s overwrought rhetoric polyfilling a collection of Marilyn Monroe pin-ups. Guiltily, we thirst for something wilder, more fearful. Though, in fairness, several ...”

“... version of this incident in Some Americans indicates that his encounter with ‘the author of The Craft of Fiction’ left a wound. The poem is more openly dismissive of his one-time employer:           I’d always thought him an ass which he pronounced arse. ‘Class’ is, with the exception of one sentence, written in the first ...”

“... he let me know that he didn’t appreciate my pun. The English, you see, have no sense of humour. Robert Lewis of St James’s Street, ‘the most beautiful cigar shop’, does not for all that escape a little mockery. ‘If the salesman feels you are truly worthy,’ says the magazine You, ‘you might be invited downstairs to the basement.’ ‘They also ...”