“... die Toten’ – ‘Blessed are the dead’), and the intensely plangent five-part Lamentations of Robert White, who died of plague in 1574, at the age of 36, along with his entire family.9 March. Europe is closing down. Flights are being cancelled. Two LRB editors have plans to go to New York, where the situation is just beginning to kick off. Sam decides to ...”

“... There’s also something in us that knows pigs can’t fly. Treglown paints a portrait of a young man delirious with his own promise. As a wounded RAF war hero (who actually crashed his plane through inexperience on a routine flight) he was sent to Washington and New York to gossip and gather intelligence about American intentions towards the Allies. He ...”

“... His father, also called Raymond, worked in sawmills, moved a lot and drank a lot. Carver married young and also moved and drank a lot. He had an ambition to be a writer but his life was so disrupted by the need to make a little money and by the incessant demands of his children that he could never get far with a novel. He had to be content with short stories ...”

“... they complement and resist each other, and they do so, crucially, in a story that focuses on a young woman, an artist in her early twenties, whose defining characteristic is that she is impossible to pin down. She is known only as Reno, after her hometown. It’s 1977, and she’s left Nevada – a ‘hard-hat-wearing, dump-truck-driving’ kind of place ...”

“... Prevalent among Women of Rank and Fortune, along with Hints towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess, which was written for Princess Charlotte, were addressed to and dutifully read by the highest in the land. Her message was directed at a ruling class that had felt the ground shaking under it. Democracy was anathema to More, who wanted to ...”

“... made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ... It is poetry because it is better than prose.’ A New Path to the Waterfall is poetry because it is better than prose. Another ...”

“... who came to Wimpole Street in 1844, was privy to her mistress’s clandestine love affair with Robert Browning (and was one of only two witnesses to her marriage) and accompanied her to Italy with a bravery which Elizabeth Barrett Browning acknowledged in the very last words of her last letter to Browning on the eve of their elopement. ‘Wilson has been ...”

“... in the present version of Tawaststjerna’s book. Aping Sibelius’s own habits of compression, Robert Layton has run the last two Swedish Finnish volumes into one, truncating or omitting the musicological I chapters that counterpoint the biographical narrative throughout and unbalancing his own English version, which retains them in Volumes I (a ...”

“... marching forward to social conquests and economic disasters. She first dabbled in politics via Robert Antelme, a charming man with a reputation for generosity, a ‘saint’ according to his friends, who were never inclined to say the same of Marguerite. After much toing and froing in an I-love-you-but-can’t-marry-you vein, Marguerite and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the present book as though he took part in this war on the virtuous side. Yet such is the case. Robert Kidd appeared on the recorded scene in 1689 at the age of about 44, as one of the crew of a buccaneering ship in the West Indies. Buccaneering and piracy were often much the same thing. Piracy had not yet acquired anything like the full odium of later ...”

“... of their kind or jewels of their country. Many of them are American: Whitman, Stevens, Ashbery, Robert Lowell, Berryman, Cummings, and I suppose Auden. The English are Larkin and Betjeman. Russians and other foreigners include Pushkin, Blok, Gogol, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Nabokov, Canetti, Milosz and Popa. The only difference I see between ...”

“... living alone, and the increase in women’s marrying age. It is reasonable to suppose that for young nurses, hospital orderlies and tea ladies increasingly living on their own or bringing up children on their own, the old pattern of rational acquiescence in low pay has become irrational. And dishonourable. From being an interlude, public-sector employment ...”

“... examples of this self-serving tendency, while supplying plenty from the 18th century. Sir Robert Walpole, effective prime minister from 1722 to 1742, was both joyously corrupt and a ruthless exponent of one-party government, yet he seems genuinely to have believed that all expressions of hostility to his protracted regime stemmed not from a sense of ...”

“... of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at Yaddo in 1948. Gordon had impeccable literary credentials. As a young writer, she had been mentored by Ford Madox Ford, who had her read an early draft of her first novel, Penhally, out ...”