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“... Ee. Gaw. Lonker. Pit. Gaw: a Fife word for a drainage furrow. I walk each day past rows of Pictish graves. Fife Council’s laying mud-brown plastic drainpipes Down the dead-straight leyline of a Pictish road. Croy. Ee. Gaw. Lonker. Pit. Lonker: a hole in a wall, a yett through which Sheep may slip, or a burn, a stream flow under. Every wall, from Hadrian’s ...”

“... carefully – at every volume on the shelves. I ended up with three paperbacks: the Greek Myths by Robert Graves, Volumes I and II, and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. This is a commonplace book written by a woman at the tenth-century court of the Heian dynasty in Japan. I thought it was wonderful. I read it countless times. I was entranced by the beauty ...”

“... generation. ‘I saw more fighting,’ he wrote, than Siegfried Sassoon, or Edmund Blunden, or Robert Graves, far more than Liddell Hart, four or five times as much as Wilfred Owen, and I didn’t go home with a nervous breakdown. [But] I fear the damage is done, and the myth of the 1930s has prevailed … When I meet some clever young scholar from ...”

“... in the coastal village of Deià in Mallorca. There they had their second child and they asked Robert Graves to name him – Philip. ‘The Relics’, which appeared in Mathews’s first collection, The Ring (1970), is a set of variations on imaginary landscapes in yellow and red, bringing to mind the Phrygian Midas, and a landscape turning to ...”

“... My name​ is Róbert Valzer and I like walking, not that I have anything to do with the famous Robert Walser, nor do I think it strange that walking should be my favourite hobby. I call it a hobby but I accept – or rather I am prepared to entertain the fact – that where I live in this Central European country I am considered to be too unstable to be regarded as a normal person and that my hobby is not to be compared with other people’s hobbies ...”

“... poetry today’ – should have told John Haffenden in an interview for Viewpoints that he found Robert Frost’s fable of imagined unlived lives, ‘The Road Not Taken’, exemplary. If Fenton’s distinction between the narrative kinds is just, so is the note of regret and rebellion that he strikes in the phrase ‘deliberately excluded from ...”

“... on Buddenbrooks for life among the haute bourgeoisie in prewar Germany and Swiss sanatoria, and Robert Musil’s Young Törless for possible events during Brandt’s schooldays. Where there is no proof, there is supposition. For example: ‘There is ample evidence that Brandt suffered a psychic wound in his school days, something so hurtful that it affected ...”

“... Poems (1932), Reconstruction (1933) – as Georgian, countryside-centred and influenced by Robert Bridges, changing swiftly to Auden’s ‘manifesto manner’ for Difficult Morning (also 1933). I am not sure about this, especially the implicit conflict between country and town: Swingler always seems to inhabit either with ease. Certainly, he inclined ...”

“... be the Shelley ménage – in a book that also explores his biographical ‘intimacy’ with Robert Louis Stevenson, Gérard de Nerval and Mary Shelley’s remarkable mother Mary Wollstonecraft – that occasions the reflection. There is something about ‘the Shelley circle’, and particularly its bizarre life abroad, that produces this effect. At its ...”

“... they were following, in some measure and according to their capacity, the brilliant example of Robert Graves, whose coming to maturity as a poet was a matter of saying a decisive ‘goodbye’ not only to the war but to all ghosts and rubbish (including cast-off language) that threatened the living. It was in 1930 that T.S. Eliot wrote in ...”

“... the Tarot, the doctrines of Freud, Jung and the neo-Jungians, Reich and his orgone accumulators, Robert Graves in his White Goddess phase, and, underlying everything, a gynaecological psychology which attaches great importance to the menstrual cycle. When faced with such a dazzling embarrassment of riches it is often useful to inspect the boo-hurrah ...”

“... was the portrayal of Caligula in BBC Television’s 1976 adaptation of I, Claudius. In his novels, Robert Graves had exploited the ancient allegations that Caligula had a suspiciously close relationship with his sister Drusilla. The inventive Jack Pulman, author of the screenplay, went even further. In a terrifying scene that has no source either in ...”

“... interval between the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. The title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, whose social history of Britain from 1918 to 1939, The Long Weekend, appeared in 1940, and it conjures up a sepia image of a tranquil Indian summer ‘in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened ...”

“... is now not only our poem, but the poem of Keats, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats, Eliot, Auden. Only Robert Graves and Laura Riding saw through it; but to return with them to the Shakespeare of Donne and Marvell is to abolish the Shakespeare of Keats and Yeats. Malone’s edition, of course, had a more problematic consequence for Shakespeare: it had him ...”

“... poets, he had a religious sense but no religion, except for the White Goddess, whom he found in Robert Graves. Having experienced an epiphany, he had a strong though not entirely easy personal connection with this goddess, believing she would ensure that he would never have a happy love, and that he would die at 29. Michael Bakewell, the agent he ...”