“... him the first issue of the Black Mountain Review and introduced him to the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly and Ray Johnson.Opinion is divided about his appearance. ‘He thought of himself as ugly,’ a boyfriend from the early 1960s said. ‘But when you saw Andy naked, he looked ...”

“... 11, leaving the family $8 after funeral expenses had been paid. Frost’s mother, Isabelle, took Robert and his sister east from San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they lived initially with her parents-in-law before Isabelle tried – with mixed results – to hold down a job as a teacher. Frost was many things before he was a poet; by the time ...”

“... know about her could be more satisfactory to me than this.’ Despite Welty’s prompt adoption by Robert Penn Warren and the Southern Review crowd, the figure who emerges from Portor’s 1941 text is Austenish, ‘a quiet, tranquil-looking, modest girl’ who sits in a corner listening. Many years, honours, fellowships and prizes later, Paul Binding meets ...”

“... mixture of excitable populism and authoritarianism, the latter copied from his revered mentor, Sir Robert Peel, whose ‘Canute-like executive arrogance’ had wrought so much damage in the 1840s. In this account Gladstone emerges as a half-crazed genius, who, unexpectedly elected as master of the college, had then gone on to write a weekly column for the ...”

“... man or woman, worker or retired, is paid the same. The shapely Edith takes Julian shopping. Each ward of the city has a single huge store: no messy, competitive, individual shops. The store stocks samples only. There are no lying salesmen, desperate for commission. An attendant notes down your choice. He whizzes it by pneumatic tube to the city’s central ...”

“... what it was about. I can’t think who the detective was either, I mean in Obituary. It wasn’t Robert Mitchum, was it?’   She shook her head, thoughtfully. ‘I’m not sure myself who was in it.’ In fact, LaBrava is in it. For obscure motives (to do with nostalgias of her own), the star has chosen to replay the movie by setting up an elaborate ...”

“... at greater length, as, in the later years, he decided he ought, citing as a model Chekhov’s ‘Ward 6’. The title story of the last volume, ‘Cathedral’, he regarded as a turning point in his career, but the career suddenly came to an end. Perhaps, had he lived, he would have moved on to the novella. One can feel sure that V.S. Pritchett would have ...”

“... explorers or scientific investigators; or slumming journalists (James Greenwood, Jack London, Robert Sherard and, later, Orwell) trying to share an experience that they could never penetrate because they knew they could always escape. And there was Dickens, who lived in denial about his childhood labour in a blacking factory and displaced his trauma onto ...”

“... using various pseudonyms. He wrote the original story for Roman Holiday (1953) and, under the name Robert Rich, earned an Oscar in 1956 for his screenplay The Brave One. He passed on work and encouragement to other victims of the anti-Communist purge and began a vigorous media campaign to end the blacklist. In 1960, Kirk Douglas revealed that Trumbo had ...”

“... of dancing. Altogether the choruses are less richly rendered than they are in the translation by Robert Fagles, but the austerity is deliberate and this whole work is very cool and restrained. It results from an independent approach to Sophocles, and the introduction offers a personal reading of the plays which is both interesting and quite unlike the way ...”

“... possession of them and then they lose their appetites and get ill.’ Only the ‘robust, hardy’ Robert, older than Jack, and two years younger than Lolly, is never attacked. ‘Bobby has sensibility,’ his father wrote, ‘will love ideas and have enthusiasms, ardours, and will go through more emotional experiences in a month than another in ten ...”

“... biography mostly does or what his will do. He is, however, already the biographer of Mrs Humphry Ward, a personality he found at least as objectionable as he finds Scott. He chooses to work against the grain – by insisting that his subjects are anything but admirable characters, and by adding that their fame exceeded their talent. Sutherland cuts Scott ...”

“... are not far to seek: his wife was the great-niece of the poet, and her mother, Mrs Humphry Ward of Robert Elsmere fame, had even composed a special free-thinkers’ marriage service for G.M. Trevelyan’s wedding. The late Victorian child was truly father to the Master of Trinity. Trevelyan was as strongly opposed to ...”

“... million from the Northern Bank in Belfast on 20 December, and on 30 January the murder of Robert McCartney in Magennis’s Bar. A few months ago it had seemed that the IRA might be on the brink of disbanding. One IRA source was quoted in Ireland’s Sunday Business Post: he said that he had been visited by a member of the IRA leadership, ‘and told ...”

“... see the end of the matter. In 1961 the Liberals, riding the wave of Jewish protest, attacked every ward in Finchley for the first time and in 1962 they won every single ward there, as well as three of the five Friern Barnet wards. It was suddenly clear that Mrs Thatcher was in real trouble. In 1959, she’d been elected with ...”