“... miles southwest of Exeter the A38 rips along the edge of the churchyard of Dean Prior, where Robert Herrick, with one period of interruption, was rector between 1630 and his death in 1674. The interruption began in or around January 1646, when the New Model Army marched along the predecessor of the A38 to relieve Plymouth. On their way they seem to have ...”

“... When​ he was nineteen or so, Al Pacino was taking acting lessons at the Herbert Berghof Studio on Sixth Avenue in New York while earning a living (just about) as a cleaner, busboy and removals man. At night, he sometimes took to the streets to declaim Shakespeare soliloquies, freed by the thought that he needed no one’s permission to play ‘Prospero, Falstaff, Shylock or Macbeth’ in the dark of the city:If the hour was late and you heard the sound of someone in your alleyway with a bombastic voice shouting iambic pentameter into the night, that was probably me, training myself on the great Shakespeare soliloquies … I’d do it by the factories, at the edges of town, where no one was around ...”

“... who can.’ Among others who leapt to the defence of culture as they knew it were Donald Hall, Herbert Gold, Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the ...”

“... LAST TILL END OF DECADE ‘The [groundfish] stocks are in the worst shape ever recorded,’ Herbert Clarke, head of the Fisheries Resource Conservation Council, said yesterday ... The Council has recommended that the fishing quotas for 1994 be cut by 60 per cent from the 1993 level ... quotas for cod and haddock will be only 5 per cent of what fishermen ...”

“... nibbled at by the sharp tooth of development. But it still just about holds. In Sprawl, Robert Bruegmann bids those of us who cherish the division between city and countryside to take stock and review our values. Everywhere, the arbitrary containment of communities is dead or dying, he argues. Where it is maintained, it is only at a cost and by a ...”

“... is able to trace bonds of professional exchange, kinship and allegiance. When Reyner Wolfe printed Robert Recorde’s The Ground of Arts – a bestseller, ‘teachyng the worke and practise of arithmetike, moch necessary for all states of men’ – Wolfe borrowed eight initials, two ornaments and some textura fonts from John Herford. And a small number of ...”

“... mother also made a somewhat pitiable fuss of her Virginia roots and claimed to be descended from Robert E. Lee. When her marriage began to fall apart, she made it her mission to educate Allen and his brothers in the details of her family history, taking them repeatedly on visits to ancestral sites and introducing them to ancient relatives. On one ...”

“... could be something private, hidden in a locket worn next to your heart. In his autobiography, Lord Herbert of Cherbury recounts how his admirer, Lady Ayres, had a full-size portrait of him ‘contracted into little form’, and wore it round her neck ‘so low that she hid it under her breasts’. Trouble ensued when her husband found her lying in ...”

“... development. The Liberal Prime Minister Asquith had originally intended to offer the job to Sir Herbert Grierson, recent editor of the poems of John Donne. However, he allowed Lloyd George to persuade him that a post of such eminence ought rather to be a party appointment. Without doubt, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) fitted that bill. He had worked ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... let it be concealed in a scenario which seemed to advance quite unexpected, even contrary views. Herbert Maisch’s romantic treatment of the young Schiller in Friedrich Schiller der Triumph eines Genius, appeared to champion free speech and tilt at authority. It is only on reflection that you notice the Nietzschean subtext: the genius is another version of ...”

“... are accommodated in larger designs. A text that illustrates this with paradigmatic elegance is Robert Graves’s poem ‘Warning to Children’ – not included in Spufford’s collection. But then which of us in his right mind or with money in her purse is going to worry about the theoretical considerations motivating the presentation of this amiable ...”

“... Through Max Ernst, a friend of Boué’s, he met the Surrealist poets and painters, and with Herbert Read and David Gascoyne, introduced Surrealism to England. He helped persuade Picasso (it didn’t take much) to contribute to the 1936 exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in Piccadilly, which launched the movement in Britain. As Penrose tells ...”

“... rejoinders are assembled here in memorial Penguins? Porter is glancing at the work of Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz, and with a slight sourness he remarks: I have seen with my own eyes a dissident poet eating whitebait and joking from the corner of his mouth. The basis of his complaint is that in England the poet can be neither dissident nor ...”

“... and her novels reflect this. She is the least provincial of writers. Cotter’s England and Miss Herbert are set in Britain, The Beauties and the Furies and House of All Nations in Paris, Letty Fox: Her Luck, The People with the Dogs, and A Little Tea, a Little Chat in New York, I’m Dying Laughing in Hollywood, The Little Hotel in Switzerland.Seven Poor ...”